

Mojang threatens lawyers against pay-to-win Minecraft server operators - atian
http://blog.tian.io/mojang-threatens-lawyers-against-pay-to-win-minecraft-server-operators

======
corysama
Conversation with a job applicant that I had a while back:

"I run this minecraft server. I've modded it so that if someone kills you, you
are banned for a week. But, you can unban yourself at any time for $5. This
pays my rent."

"So, people come to your server specifically because it adds a heavy penalty
that does not exist in the standard game and then they pay you to remove that
penalty?"

"Yes."

It sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense for a subset of hardcore players.
They want PvP. But, ganking you just isn't satisfying if you just respawn next
to me a second later. However, if I know that over on the other end of the
internet you are genuinely pissed that I ganked you --that's satisfying!
Similarly, if I know that getting whacked has real consequences, it makes the
game much more exciting and intense.

~~~
wfn
These are called hardcore survival servers. They are basically what made me
attracted to the idea of playing minecraft multiplayer, actually.

I remember seeing a picture of someone discovering a random build in the
middle of a forest (in a large map) on /r/minecraft. Apparently people still
do builds on these kinds of servers! Even if that's usually dangerous! And how
interesting it is to find such a build.. or bump into someone, and do a bit of
game theory ("should we try to kill each other, or should we trade?") (the
latter is not that usual, granted!)

(Normally, you start by running away from the spawn point (which is a safe
zone), to find food (nearby food sources are usually nonexistent), and make a
small shelter. You then move on to building an underground base (e.g. under an
ocean floor), building up armour, maybe going back to spawn eventually.. Or
maybe you stack up resources, and just roam around the lands, or go out with
some friendly people to found a city. There are spawn-campers who try to kill
noobs, and then sometimes there are people who try to hunt down the noob-
killers. Sometimes there are also people who plant seeds around the spawn to
help out... etc.)

------
altcognito
More likely story: Mojang recently released "realms" which is basically a
rent-a-server model, and these are competitors to their business.

Optimistically, they are trying to bring uniformity and clean up some of the
more toxic servers that are out there.

[https://minecraft.net/realms](https://minecraft.net/realms)

~~~
citricsquid
That's a conspiracy theory that doesn't hold water. Preventing servers from
selling items does not encourage people to use Minecraft Realms, Realms serves
a completely different player base. Realms are limited in capacity and limited
in ability, the servers that operate as successful businesses selling items
(that will be affected by this change) have up to 10,000 players online at any
one time running hundreds of plugins, the maximum players a Realm can have is
10 and they do not support any plugins. They're not comparable services.

From my position (I manage a third-party Minecraft website) I completely
believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort to
protect their customers, I don't know if it's the right decision or not but I
don't believe they're trying to be anti-competitive.

~~~
wtbob
> From my position (I manage a third-party Minecraft website) I completely
> believe that Mojang are starting to take their EULA seriously in an effort
> to protect their customers…

How in God's name does removing incentives for server owners to provide me
with service protect me from anything?

I play modded Minecraft; the vanilla game isn't even interesting to me
anymore. It takes quite a lot of work to get all those mods to play well
together; it takes even more work to get them to play well together with the
server-side mods which make playing on a large server fun.

Removing the ability for server owners to make money from the game removes
those servers from existence, which destroys my ability to have fun with the
game I paid for.

Once I stop playing, I stop suggesting Minecraft to other people, and they
stop buying it, and Mojang stops making money.

How is this good for _anyone_?

~~~
citricsquid
> How is this good for anyone?

A significant number of Minecraft players do not understand that servers are
not ran by Mojang, they don't understand that the servers they're playing on
are ran by independent third parties (often individuals with no business
registration) so when they're asked to spend $10, $20, $100 by a server they
believe they're spending money on the game itself (much like buying something
on the xbox market place), they believe they're paying to play Minecraft and
that because Minecraft is a big popular game that they have all of the
consumer protections that come with purchasing from a legitimate company...
They don't have any consumer protections though, they're 10 year old kids
paying other kids $10 for a chest of diamonds and when that 10 year old gets
banned it's Mojang who deal with the fallout.

As I said I don't know if it's the right decision but I do believe that this
is a move to protect their customers and that it isn't a conspiracy to sell
more Realms. My experience managing a third-party website backs this up
because I deal with tickets from parents regarding server purchases, just as
Mojang have said they do.

------
jamescun
Mojang seem to be forgetting that it costs money to operate a server, and a
"freemium" model is a completely viable and legitimate way to fund that
operation (other ways such as accepting donations and paid-players only
exist).

Some may say you are in essence paying a third party for Mojang's work, when
in fact you have already done so by purchasing the game in the first place.
What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game?

Ultimately it comes down to what players want, players are not afraid to vote
with their feet and abandon servers which operate in this way; as of yet there
seems to be no widespread trend in abandoning these servers.

As an aside, I believe this is more likely a push by Mojang to shut down paid
servers and move people onto their Minecraft Realms product which does exactly
this.

~~~
valarauca1
The problem is a lot of server admins claim it costs $1000-2000+ a month to
run a unmodded minecraft server (with ~100 players). And a lot of players
simply accept that as true.

~~~
pktgen
Large Minecraft servers generally need sizable DDoS protection, so $1k is
possible.

~~~
valarauca1
Larger, when you start to get into 100-200+ concurrent players I can start to
understand but when you have about 100 total users its around 3/4 to half that
cost.

------
Karunamon
Yknow.. this is kind of backwards. If someone wants to donate to a server and
get diamonds, I don't see how that is Mojang's place to dictate.

If they were hosting the servers, sure. But on a private server?

~~~
Skiptar
The issue is you're paying money to a third party for mojang's work, more
precisely something which you have already paid for by purchasing the game. If
you ignore the game itself and look at it from a purely technical view, what
people are essentially doing is running code on their own servers (Which is
allowed) but then charging people for bits of the code written by mojang
(Which is not allowed).

For most private servers you see, they will have a list of "donation" amounts
and a "reward" for each, however this is quite clearly a sale since you are
exchanging a commodity for money. To be classed as a donation, you would need
to donate money without the requirement of something in return.

I think Mojang are clearly right here, but not to the advantage of the
minecraft community.

~~~
mikeash
What's wrong with charging to expose functionality on a server you own, just
because that functionality involves code written by somebody else?

For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and
charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code
written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and
Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.

Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few
shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I
see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.

~~~
pix64
Every program makes use of the OS. You literally couldn't do anything without
using the OS.

------
kawsper
10 years ago ISPs, and internet-cafés in Denmark had reserved slots for paying
members on their counterstrike-servers. I guess such a system would also be
disallowed under the Mojang license.

One of my friend also hosted a Minecraft-server where you would get access to
a /teleport-command if you supported the servers. I guess that would also
violate the Mojang license.

What about Youtube-streamers? I guess they are using Mojang code to monetize
as well.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I guess so, yeah, the EULA is pretty clear about it. I think the article hints
at Mojang being upset at server hosters locking features that are in the game
itself though, like certain ranges of tools or items, in exchange for money.

~~~
pjmlp
Except the fact that EULAs are void in most European countries.

~~~
joshvm
Citation needed?

In the US there have been cases where EULAs have been upheld, not sure about
outside. There is a lot of misinformation on the internet about whether
they're valid, whether you have to explicitly accept them and so on. I think
in a lot of cases it depends on how much money the prosecutors have - in most
cases it's more than you.

I believe they're invalid if the terms are confusing to the lay-user, i.e. if
there is so much legalese that nobody actually understands what they're
signing up for. Or if it makes ridiculous claims like "Buy buying the product
you forfeit your soul".

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/25/microsoft_eula/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/25/microsoft_eula/)

El Reg reckons it's not worth testing it, for the lawyer-money problem. There
haven't been enough lawsuits outside the US to really say one way or the
other.

~~~
pjmlp
For example,

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-03-eu-rules-
publis...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-03-eu-rules-publishers-
cannot-stop-you-reselling-your-downloaded-games)

In case you can read German,

[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-
Lizenzvertrag](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-Lizenzvertrag)

in Germany, a EULA is only valid if the consumer is able to fully read it
before paying for the respective product.

~~~
wolfgke
Even more > [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-
Lizenzvertrag#Situa...](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-
Lizenzvertrag#Situation_in_Deutschland) (German, sorry; I'll try to translate
it roughly into English):

"Even if the license terms were agreed when buying, their effectiveness can be
restricted. Then they are general business terms and their content is governed
by the content control of the Civil Law Code.".

Thus many of terms in EULAs are not valid under German law - the terms that
are allowed are rather restricted (and thus lots of Germans will not
understand the fealty that US citizens seem to have to EULAs).

------
Maskawanian
I like Minecraft, played it for a while...

However, what right does Mojang have to dictate this?

~~~
dangoor
People are using Mojang code.

~~~
Karunamon
Just because it's in a EULA doesn't make it legal, enforceable, ethical, or
moral.

~~~
dangoor
I agree with you. But, IANAL so I have no idea if it's legal or enforceable.

Given the "what right does Mojang have?" question, though, the answer is that
assuming the EULA for the server code is enforceable, _copyright_ is the right
they have.

~~~
angersock
Which begs the question...does copyright sensibly mean anything when it is
being run entirely on a machine owned by somebody else, especially with
functionality introduced not by the original authors?

I could buy a trademark infringement argument, perhaps, but _copyright_
doesn't seem to really make sense.

~~~
drdaeman
IANAL, but I think if server owner's jurisdiction prevents them from using
software without obtaining a license _and_ this jurisdiction allows this exact
kind of noncompliance to void the whole license (which is not always the case)
- probably yes, it has a meaning.

Obviously, it only matters if someone notices the noncompliance and lack of
the license. For example if Mojang actually sues.

~~~
Karunamon
And to them I say "good luck with that" in the most sarcastic tone I can
muster. There are tens of thousands of private servers out there - the effort
they play at expending on shutting down the _despicable and horrible and bad
and terrible_ practice of paid perks could be better redirected at further
developing their games.

This is the kind of priority fail I'd expect from EA or some other massive
publisher, not an indie rockstar like Mojang.

~~~
drdaeman
You see, the discussion - as I get it - was about very status of the copyright
law - i.e. whenever there's a legal basis for a lawsuit or Mojang threats are
void. It wasn't about server operators who don't give a damn about that - sure
there are some.

------
raker
I think this was brought about by a recent conflict that occurred (and gained
some attention on reddit at least) on twitter. Mojang has been well aware of
servers that "sell" in-game items and in-game features (the ability to
teleport or fly, for instance) for a fee. This is against Mojang's TOS, and
Mojang has taken down several servers in the past for various TOS violations
including this pay-to-win stuff. During the recent twitter bout, a Mojang
representative stated there was a distinction between a server accepting
donation, and a server rewarding donations/selling ingame benefits. A server
accepting donations in order to continue running is A-OK, but a server selling
benefits violates the TOS.

This recent activity from Mojang to reclarify their TOS and actively tackle
violations was likely a result of last week's twitter bout.

------
DanBC
It'd be interesting to see what an HN server would look like.

I'm glad Mojang is protecting their (often very young) userbase. Perhaps they
also need a "Minecraft for non-players" faq that they can point paying adults
to.

------
walterbell
When someone buys a copy of Minecraft, does it include code to run a
multiplayer server? Or did the community modify the Minecraft "client" code?

~~~
Yen
The server binary can be downloaded, for free, here
([https://minecraft.net/download](https://minecraft.net/download)).

However, as far as I'm aware, the actual code is not available. If and when it
is available, it won't be under a free license.

------
phazmatis
So people will just create a cleanroom reverse-engineered version of the
mojang server.

~~~
MzHN
I was about to ask this.

If you have no Mojang code, media assets nor use the Minecraft name anywhere,
on what grounds would they try to shut you down?

