Microsoft’s AI-Powered Copyright Bots Fucked Up And Got An Innocent Game Delisted From Steam
At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long, those bots have absolutely sucked out loud at their jobs. We have seen example after example after example of those bots making mistakes, resulting in takedowns or threats of takedowns of all kinds of perfectly legit content. Upon discovery, the content is usually reinstated while those employing the copyright decepticons shrug their shoulders and say “Thems the breaks.” And then it happens again.
It has to change, but isn’t. We have yet another recent example of this in action, with Microsoft’s copyright enforcement partner using an AI-driven enforcement bot to get a video game delisted from Steam over a single screenshot on the game’s page that looks like, but isn’t, from Minecraft. The game in question, Allumeria, clearly is partially inspired by Minecraft, but doesn’t use any of its assets and is in fact its own full-fledged creative work.
On Tuesday, the developer behind the Minecraft-looking, dungeon-raiding sandbox announced that their game had been taken down from Valve’s storefront due to a DMCA copyright notice issued by Microsoft. The notice, shared by developer Unomelon in the game’s Discord server, accused Allumeria of using “Minecraft content, including but not limited to gameplay and assets.”
The takedown was apparently issued over one specific screenshot from the game’s Steam page. It shows a vaguely Minecraft-esque world with birch trees, tall grass, a blue sky, and pumpkins: all things that are in Minecraft but also in real life and lots of other games. The game does look pretty similar to Minecraft, but it doesn’t appear to be reusing any of its actual assets or crossing some arbitrary line between homage and copycat that dozens of other Minecraft-inspired games haven’t crossed before.
It turns out the takedown request didn’t come from Microsoft directly, but via Tracer.AI. Tracer.AI claims to have a bot driven by artificial intelligence for automatic flagging and removal of copyright infringing content.
It seems the system failed to understand in this case that the image in question, while being similar to those including Minecraft assets, didn’t actually infringe upon anything. Folks at Mojang caught wind of this on BlueSky and had to take action.
While it’s unclear if the claim was issued automatically or intentionally, Mojang Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten (known to most Minecraft players as Jeb) responded to a comment about the takedown on Bluesky, stating that he was not aware and is now “investigating.” Roughly 12 hours later, Allumeria‘s Steam page has been reinstated.
“Microsoft has withdrawn their DMCA claim!” Unomelon posted earlier today. “The game is back up on Steam! Allumeria is back! Thank you EVERYONE for your support. It’s hard to comprehend that a single post in my discord would lead to so many people expressing support.”
And this is the point in the story where we all go back to our lives and pretend like none of this ever happened. But that sucks. For starters, there is no reason we should accept that this kind of collateral damage, temporary or not. Add to that there are surely stories out there in which a similar resolution was not reached. How many games, how much other non-infringing content out there, were taken down for longer from an erroneous claim like this? How many never came back?
And at the base level, the fact is that if companies are going to claim that copyright is of paramount importance to their business, that can’t be farmed out to automated systems that aren’t good at their job.