Minecraft Forums

A long time ago, I was a small software company, and I sold gamemaster's aid products to D&D players, etc. This was back in the days when TSR was still TSR. Their shakedown guy, a fellow named Robb Repp, came around to my booth at GenCon the first year I was there and started in on how my products could be used to ifringe on TSR's copyrights. I agreed that yes, this was true, and if TSR wanted to sue me, I'd get in line behind Xerox, Lotus, and the Ticonderoga Pencil Company, because copiers, word processors, and #2 pencils could be used at least as effectively for the same thing, and undoubtedly were far more often. TSR backed down. Yes, I was lucky, but I had the advantage of being both right and belligerent about it. Unlike the other small vendors they were intimidating, I clearly wasn't going to back down. So they turned their attention to the people who were. It's like running away from a lion: you don't have to be faster than the lion, just faster than the other guy.

My bet is that Putt-Putt doesn't think that Mojang is really infringing on their trademarks; they're probably looking for danegeld -- they want a payoff to go away. It's sort of corporate extortion: "Pay us or we'll litigate you into the ground. You can't afford to fight us long enough to win." Of course, they never go away. Rudyard Kipling put it best: "For once you have paid him the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane."

My wallet-vote is very small, but until Putt-Putt apologizes to Mojang, any miniature golfing I do will be done at courses they don't own. I think that would be a fair stance for any and all Minecraft players, and for that matter any people concnerned about this kind of extortion.

Copyright laws are not stupid. Someone who creates something puts a lot of work into it, and they deserve to have their rights protected. Now, the length of copyright terms has gotten ridiculous -- stuff that was created before I was born will still be in copyright after I die, which is certainly only "a limited time" within the letter, not the spirit, of the US Constitution.

However, this isn't about copyrights; it's about trademarks. There's a BIG difference. They're covered by different laws. They exist for different reasons. They're registered with different agencies in the government. And enforcement works in different ways. In particular, copyrights exist from the moment something is "fixed in tangible form" (say, written down) and do not have to be affirmatively enforced. Trademarks, on the other hand, do have to be enforced or they're lost, such as has happned with trademarks from Aspirin to Zipper in the past. And trademark laws have, in recent years, been used much less often to protect a company's actual product and identity from look-alikes and more often as a weapon against competitors or a tool to pry money loose from unrelated companies.

That latter is, I think, what's happening here. Putt-Putt is hoping that Mojang will hand over money, so they can get thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars for no more effort than sending out a letter. If their legal department is so poor that they genuinely believed that Mojang was in control of what customers did with their product, they'd be fired for incompetence. I think this is a cash grab.

We all play Minecraft. We all know people who play Minecraft. And, it appears, at least some of us play miniature golf. What we, as players, need to do is to contact Putt-Putt and tell them, very politely, that we are not cool with what they're doing, and until they cease and desist in their own actions, and apologize to Mojang, we and anyone we can influence will spend our money with their competitors instead of them. We have to make it clear that it is their actions which has caused this -- that we don't want to do business with people who act as they have. Consider that if even a thousand people out of the millions who play Minecraft don't spend $100 each with Putt-Putt in the next year, that's a hundred K in money they've lost because of this groundless threat to Mojang. This kind of corporate extortion only works because the customers of both companies tolerate it. We don't have to.

Quote from oukskirts

What I want to know is why is this posted to the public? If it is such a common thing as stated in the post why even bother posting it? Are they trying to sabotage their business by making this public or something?

Mojang posted it, not Putt-Putt. I assume they wanted to expose it for public mockery. It's certainly worthy.