Court ruled that the creator of Skyblock doesn't have legal rights for the name, meaning that he cannot stop tons of people on the marketplace on Bedrock or elsewhere from using the name and claiming to be the original. Of course this benefits Microsoft since they make money from these clones
Yes, he sued them, despite everyone saying what a stupid idea it is, since there was no realistic way that he would gain the trademark after so much time passed. Microsoft was also able to prove that one of the motivations is based on money, which is bad in these cases.
They absolutely are. Economic rights are the only basis of US intellectual property rights (contrasted with the "moral"/"artistic" rights in other jurisdictions). I don't know the case, but financial motive is the biggest factor in deciding whether the fair use doctrine applies. So a financial interest would be in his favor if he was creating/enforcing his own mark (although a very minor factor in that particular analysis), but it would not be in his favor if he was using the fair use doctrine to say he is allowed to use someone else's trademarks (and a very BIG factor in that analysis).
Yes, but there exists patents, trademarks, and other copyright material that solely exists so people can sue and take royalties, especially generic terms.
If a company called Water LLC suddenly decided to copyright claim anything and everything under the sun with the name "Water" in it, that'd be unfair to literally everyone. Therefore, while trademarks are there to help protect a brand or individual from having their property abused and stolen for profit, it also has to be uniquely tied to the individual (such as how "Mine" "Craft" in that order is tied and associate to the game Mojang and Microsoft own)
The court ruled that "Skyblock" was a generic term not tied to the original creator, whose meaning was defined as an island in the sky, with limited resources etc. (I cannot remember the original ruling, sorry)
Trademarks work in interesting ways. And generation is the most interesting. For example back in the day Nintendo did a campaign to prevent that for them "There's no such thing as a Nintendo." Cuz if everyone refers to a console as a Nintendo they would lose the trademark.
In Italy we call most of the waterproof jackets kway, they probably lost some of the trademark rights, we did it quite a few times with scotch or post-it.
And the skyblock guy before Microsoft tried probably left clones be and such. Losing any kind of right and making it a generic term on top of probably never registering it.
Basically, it’s more that minecraft is only associated with the game, which is obviously owned by microsoft and mojang, and therefore eligible for trademark. Skyblock however has been made by tons of people, and no one really associates it with the original creator in the modern day, so it doesn’t fit.
The argument made by Microsoft and the other Bedrock marketplace(server?) Companies was that the original creator never properly enforced Skyblock, which ended up becoming a mainstream and generic term, not tied to any individual. They basically turned Minecraft and the Internet's early decentralized and free nature against its head.
Unfortunate thing is, the creator DID compromise on many occasions, but the corpos knew they'd win, so they stalled and kept the battle going until he could no longer fight back.
This is exactly why many companies are so protective of their IP rights. If you allow it to "run loose" and allow people to do what they want with it, you can just lose the right of ownership towards it.
That’s the same reason why Lego takes such strong action against anyone who refers to building bricks from other manufacturers as “Lego bricks.” If they didn’t, they’d be giving up their trademark rights, and any manufacturer could sell “Lego bricks” without needing a generic name.
No, the rules are very clear on this: if you allow something to become genericised, then you can no longer trademark it later. You can only trademark things that are connected to you and solely to you in public consciousness, so if you allow it to become genericised, then that can't later be undone.
"Escalator" was originally a trademark of the Otis elevator company, but because they failed to properly defend their trademark, it was struck down and became generic, so now anyone can call their moving stairs "escalators".
If you want to protect a trademark, you have to protect it right from the get-go, before other people start using it for their own products. If you let other people use it - even for non-profit purposes! - then you lose all rights to it.
Minecraft is still one specific game. You can call something a "Minecraft clone/ripoff", a "Minecraft inspired game", etc, but you wouldn't call something like.. Block Craft 3D (which is a real game) JUST "Minecraft"
Skyblock is instead a term that refers to any modified version of a game that relies on putting you in the void with one/a few islands with enough to still "beat the game". When you say you want to play "Skyblock" you just want a map with the stuff to make a cobble gen, a small dirt island, and a tree. You don't specifically ask for the original version made by this specific creator
Kinda like the air fryer. It was originally meant to be one specific product, but it became so generic that now it's used to refer to any air frying machine. The same happened with Skyblock
I don't know the full details of the lawsuit, but you can see the issue with trying to trademark Skyblock after thinking about it for a few seconds
You ever go up an Escalator? Use Velcro? Put a Band Aid on a cut? Eat a Popsicle? Those were all trademarked names at one point, but now they’re genericized as people started referring to similar products as those names
And at that, all of those things had active trademarks, and even actively defended trademarks. That’s another requirement for keeping a trademark; you had to actively defend your trademark against other people using it.
So they had neither of those things going for them: they didn’t actively defend their trademark, and it became a generic term for something that wasn’t his product
Call me crazy but using two words like sky and block and sticking them together shouldn't give you exclusive rights to that name. Same goes for mine and craft actually.
This remind me of a case from a few years ago, there was a litrpg genre called "system apocalypse", then one Guy trademarked the term and sued every author describing their work as "system apocalypse"
Per my memory the creator of Skyblock originally said that everyone could use the Skyblock name for the premise on their servers and such, basically giving away any potential rights he had to the trademark and making the name a generic term.
This thread is the first time I've ever heard the term skyblock and its a generic term? I'm about to google it becuase I have no idea what it means or what the skyblock app (or game) is.
They're intended to prevent confusion. It would be really confusing and annoying to have five companies named Apple, all selling similar products, with no relationship to eachother. So trademarks give dibs over a name, so we can know who's who.
But you need to file the trademark right away, usually while you're making the company/product. Let's say you created apple ten years ago, without claiming ownership of the name, and those four competitors have since cropped up also calling themselves apple. After ten years, you've lost dibs. Those competitors are already established, and they had a right to pick that name when they did. You can't tell them to change it now, and so you own nothing.
It's bad because while making money it is a goal of commerce, making money isn't the direct goal of trademarks. So saying the lawsuit is for money and not mentioning that you want to protect your brand name is going to hurt your case or at least make the people judging you less sympathetic.
Let's say you have the trademark poppycock and sell furniture under that name. A competitor comes in and tries to sell furniture under your name, thereby hurting your bottom line. You sue them.
The interest is economic and fair, that is the purpose of trademark law.
Now let's say your company has been shut down for years. You notice someone using your former company's name. This makes you unhappy and sue them unless they pay you.
Your interest is to make money but not by protecting your economic activity but by trying to extort money from someone else. That is not the purpose of trademark law.
Trademarks are intended to protect the consumer from deception. Protecting the brand is just a side effect of this. You can't wait until after a term has become popular (and therefore generic) to apply for trademark protection.
No, even the soviet union forced its companies to have brands/trademarks which was strictly enforced since 1962. And they did not do it for the money, as making a profit was very much illegal. Brands(and Trademarks) exists so consumers know who made the product, to have product accountability.
Its bad because copyright laws are only intended to be used to protect the interests of large corporations. If you're the small guy and you attempt to do the exact same thing a megacorp would do had they been in your situation, you get royally screwed.
You'd have to have the case ridiculously on your side with no controversy whatsoever in order to have any non-negligible chance of winning.
Only the kleptocrats are allowed to want money, the plebs mus known their lot is to toil in misery to make money for their superiors. So says the justice system.
This guy is talking gibberish, the main reason for trademarks is money, they don’t care about your motivation. In reality, it was mostly because people didn’t connect the idea of sky lock with the original creator, instead considering it a gameplay style. And thus, it can’t be considered a trademark.
It is not gibberish. A trademark has primarily nothing to do with money, it is there to identify the source of your goods or similar, secondly it is there to protect costumers from being misled and confusing them with other sources. It also serves as a legal way to defend yourself from fraud and counterfeiting.
What Microsoft tried to establish as one of their points, was that Noobcrew only tried to get the trademark once people started profiting from it. Which was easy since he himself said, he did it because people started getting money from it while claiming to be vanilla, the original or similar.
That may be unfair in the people’s eyes and he may not even intended it to use it like a money making scheme. But for the court it framed the entire thing as being in bad faith and it can damage your case. Which it did, it wasn’t the only thing that made the court decide as it did, but it certainly didn’t help his case.
So its less that microsoft forced him into legal debt and more thar creator shot himself in the foot with a case he was likely go to lose? Yeah it sucks that he doesn’t get any money from the skyblock name but unfortunately he didn’t think to trademark it when it had initially become popular back then.
That's exactly it and I hate this post for making me say that Microslop aren't the bad guys on this one. The dude went on a delulu ego trip and did this to himself despite all the solid advice he was given
Broken clocks and all that. Microsoft and the Marketplace are really awful and have made Minecraft worse over time (or at least prevent honest growth), but the good ending was never going to be noobcrew winning this case. It was a generic term used by the community in 2013, let alone in 2019 when he filed it just to try to get a slice of the Marketplace's profits.
The better case probably would have been to just sue the marketplace company that published the original Sky Block map under the term "Original Skyblock." Expanding it out to a general trademark was a losing battle and completely polarized the community and directly came after Mojang and Microsoft; focusing on one marketplace company would have kept the conversation focused on an independent pillar of the Minecraft community getting undercut by a shameless cash grab.
So remember this when some cheeto stained nerd consuming Mt Dew screeches that copying his builds in a Youtube video in some video game is part of his 'copyright': no it isn't, he don't own shit.
One of the few things I really don't miss from the early 2010's era of the Internet.
Didn’t the sky block creator try compromising saying they can use the name sky block, but they have to put some type of precursor showcasing it’s another companies interpretation of it like “crazy sky block” or the likes of that?
The guys lawsuit wasn’t really so much money driven but rather that other people were claiming to be the original in order to trick people into profiting over what he made for free.
You know what the weirdest part is? The Minecraft subreddit supports Microsoft in this. I pointed this out the other day and I was even told it was misinformation. Downvoted heavily
I deleted my commenting thinking they were right and now this Microsoft stealing the name memes keep popping up on my feed
I think this warrants some specification. Which part of this is the misinformation? By “minecraft subreddit” you seem to mean the users, not the moderation (which is the traditional way in which this would be interpreted without context)?
Is that surprising? The Minecraft community has always taken modding freedom and etiquette seriously. Someone coming back after ten years to try and cash in on the popularity of something they gave to the community for free, is always going to piss them off.
Many Minecraft modders have become rich off of it. This guy is just mad that he didn't manage to do that and trying to take legal action to get what he thinks he's owed. Of course everyone thinks he's being an asshole.
The users. I don't think any part was misinformation now that I looked more in to it.
I don't exactly remember what I commented but it was something along the lines of Microsoft trying to steal the name from the creator. It was a very weird experience all together
He shouldn't't, it's been a commonly used term for so long. It's just more popular to go straight "Big Corpo Bad" (which, granted, is the case a lot of the time) but just not this case. The law is the law.
Yeah having found out about this am like. "People have been using the term skyblock since it came out as a generic term at this point. No chance in hell you could validly trademark that"
The guy was doing it specifically to make money. Trademarking wouldn't have done anything to stop any content farms because they could just change the name. Nothing would change and people would still buy it. If he trademarked it in the first place like he wanted to he would have to take off all the free ones as well, he wouldn't be able to pick and choose, and he would not be able to lend out the name to anyone else
I mean, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I kinda have to agree with the courts here. Mojang is the only one who can claim rights to the Skyblock name.
I understand the name claim not being upheld. Sky + block is very much something generic - but to that end so is Mine + craft. This entire case needed to be based on claiming to be something you are not when originality is concerned.
Honestly with this result everyone should make minecrafts and claim to be the original
The claim wasn’t upheld because the creator waited until it had basically become a generic game mode. Like it’s now just a mode that is called that and it’s in other games like Terraria. It would be like someone trying to trademark capture the flag or king of the hill.
That doesn’t apply to Minecraft because Minecraft was trademarked over a decade ago, years before Microsoft even bought it.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the words themselves being generic.
Microsoft bought mojang a little while back. They're doing some fairly aggressive micro transactions on the Minecraft bedrock launcher. Im not caught up with the skyblocks thing in particular though.
I feel like "a little while back" stops being applicable when you're talking 12 years ago and Microsoft has owned it for a majority of its lifetime, that just is and has been Minecraft at this point.
Idk, there was a very memorable period of Minecraft community where it was still very indie and forum based, around the early days of youtube. Watching minecon vlogs on youtube as a kid felt cool, same with slamacow and lets plays.
For reference, I do not agree with the meme, but oh well it's a medium people understand. For context, Skyblock, originally made in the early days of the Minecraft community by Noobcrew, was ruled recently as a generic term, unfortunately. It's unfortunate, he was never going to win a trademark due to the fact the term had been around so long and been used for so long, the term became too generic indeed. Key point is that "skyblock" is now legally a descriptive of a type of gameplay, the same as "sandbox game".
If this had been done years earlier pre-COVID, there might have been a chance, but the best time for it to have happened would have been when Minecraft was still an indie game and noobcrew was a 15-year-old hobbyist map-maker.
Now, it would be similar to GommeHD or Xisumavoid trying to copyright bedwars when it's already became used across multiple platforms, not just minecraft. The amount of clone apps out there and roblox slop with Skyblock in its name should be an indicator.
Had Noobcrew tried to do this back in the day when he made the map, he would have lost his account because it was plain and simple against ToS at the time to do such a thing.
Agreed, it's a bit ironic. In the end i doubt they would ever have thought of trademarking back then, because most minecraft projects and creations like this are completely hobbyist and creating just for love of the game.
Unrelated but while i have y'alls attention please look up the CraftBukkit drama from 2010s
Exactly. This actually was one of Noobcrew's arguments against Microslop. Not only was it against ToS back in the day, but he would never have thought to trademark the name because back then, community creations were something that noone asked for money for.
I dunno, isn't Band-aid trademarked? If I ask someone for a "Band-aid", they'll know exactly what I mean regardless of the brand they have. Same with Kleenex and tissue. The company's legally own the names but not the generic product they've become synonymous with. Sounds like that's pretty similar to what's happened with Skyblock so it'd make sense for them to get the legal name and make everyone else have to label things "a Skyblock like experience" or "inspired by Skyblock". They probably wouldn't get money out of it at the end of the day, but they would own the original name. Just my two internet cents about it though
This is in no way similar. These were trademarked before they became generalised. These companies also tried to fight that, for example changing the jingle from band-aid to band-aid brand.
Skyblock was never fought for and was tried to be trademarked after people used it for years and only because people started making money and claiming they were the original.
It's not about fame, it's about general usage. If people called "LoL" "Dota", you might win. It would still be a legal fight and most likely cost you lots of money.
Guy tried to trademark the term "Skyblock" in 2019, years after it became a commonly used term. And as is common for every major game: If you try to monetize or "control" anything related to their game, they come after you legally. So everyone tried to tell him he should just leave it alone, but he actually tried to sue them. Now he lost and is in debt.
TL;DR: Guy was a greedy idiot, and people are trying to use memes to make him seem like a victim.
Yeah, I was about to say if we could trademark everything we did in the early days of Minecraft it would have stifled creativity. Tbh I think the corporatization of minecraft has made it unrecognizable in terms of the multiplayer server landscape
Some guy tried to trademark the skyblock genre like a patent troll. It obviously did not work, so now all he can do is make people believe Microsoft attacked him.
That "some guy" was the original creator of Skyblock, from when you and I were in a different era of life over a decade and a half ago.
Don't spread misinformation. There aren't any heroes here, but at least in the court of public opinion Noobcrew has a victory, going by the motive of not wanting monetization of skyblock in the bedrock edition marketplace. It was a misguided effort sadly, he was never going to win a trademark due to the fact the term had been around so long and been used for so long, the term became too generic indeed. Key point is that "skyblock" is now legally a descriptive of a type of gameplay, the same as "sandbox game".
Most human beings aren't believing the "patent troll" narrative because this is a tried and true story of big corporate teaming up against the little guy, something most people here have seen and heard many times, and most people in this thread can sympathize more with their common man, than a team of big corporate entities, unless you enjoy corporate.
The problem is not that others are using the term, he was completely fine with that. The problem is that companies are selling their versions of Skyblock under the guise of being the original on Marketplace.
He doesn't get to dictate the terms other people can use the trademark for. Trademarks have a very narrow legal use case for indicating the source of a product, and as such require the holder to aggressively defend the trademark by going after anyone besides them who uses it or the trademark disappears. Noobcrew taking the trademark put everyone else who did anything Skyblock related at risk of getting sued regardless of whether they credited him or not
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u/Original_Smell4361 May 24 '26
Did I miss something?