Are Mojang turning into hypocrites?

ShelLuser · Jun 2, 2016

Hi gang,

So one of my favorite IT news sites (The Register) ran an article about yet another addition to Mojang's advertising policy. You can find the Register article here, and the Mojang blog post which started this can be found here; about "promotions build into Minecraft".

In short Mojang added yet another limitation to their EULA which should prevent people from using Minecraft for the explicit reason to advertise their own products, products unrelated to Minecraft. But there's one section in their blog post which sounds odd to me, and that triggered the following reaction which I sent to The Register, and I figured I'd also share it with you guys:

ShelLuser's El Reg comment said:

Hypocisy?

I get the strong impression that Mojang are slowly turning into a bunch of hypocrites where commercial use of their product is concerned. Worse yet: I also don't think that's their intention, but the way they act and make it sound does fuel this opinion only more.

In this new update they state: "We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server.".

All fine and well, but that's not something you said 2 years ago (and which comment has never been changed): "Over the past week there’s been lots of discussion about Minecraft servers and your right to monetise them. Legally, you are not allowed to make money from our products. There has been one exception to this rule so far - Minecraft videos. We’re about to make a second exception - Minecraft servers.". See their article here about server monetisation.

And now they're suddenly saying that we should be able to make money from our creativity? Then I start to wonder what kind of creativity they're talking about, because it doesn't seem to apply to mods (Minecraft "plugins"), in-game structures or basically anything related to Minecraft. Because their official stance (see their EULA) has always been: "Essentially the simple rule is do not make commercial use of anything we've made unless we've specifically said it's okay. Oh and if the law expressly allows it, such as under a "fair use" or fair dealing" doctrine then that's ok too - but only to the extent that the law applicable to you says so.".

Right, lets look at their opinion on people making mods ('plugins'), it's from that same EULA: "Any Mods you create for the Game from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them and so long as you don't distribute Modded Versions of the Game.".

So summing up: their current article says that they want to empower the Minecraft community to make money from their creativity but their EULA says you can't make money from mods, in-game structures, or anything related to Minecraft. I consider that a clear display of hypocrisy, because eventually they don't want anyone to make money from using their game while they now imply that they do allow for that.

MCSaw · Jun 2, 2016

Interesting post. A lot is changing. I don't believe it's just the team, but a higher power of order. This could bring very disctructive means with it. The community will suffer.

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Are Mojang turning into hypocrites?

ShelLuser Bronze Forum Member

MCSaw Esteemed Member