I run a small Minecraft server and I've encountered a pretty irritating issue. Every single structure on our server was built by players on the server, and it's all original content- we have a strict rule against ripping off stuff from TV shows, movies, other games, other servers, et cetera.
Today, I found out that one of the many users who was banned from our server has somehow got his hands on an old copy of our map. For all of his complaints about our server, he goes and copies the map...
My question is, has he taken our server's intellectual property by loading our map without permission? If he has, what can I do to prevent him from ripping off our stuff? I take running my server very seriously (probably too seriously, honestly) and I hate to see our ideas get stolen.
No using someone else's Minecraft world file is not illegal to do, unless the files were obtained in an illegal fashion, such as hacking into your server to download the world files. If you put your world files up for download at some point, it is especially not illegal to use them, as you've gone so far as to share it. Quite honestly no court is going to even look at a case involving someone ripping off someone else's virtual world from a video game. Minecraft is the intellectual property of Mojang, hence I don't believe you can do something in the vanilla game, then call it your own intellectual property. What are all those blocks you used to build your cool buildings with? Blocks made and put in the game by Mojang, hence it is not your intellectual property.
Only advice I could give you is to not share your world files if you have done so previously, and tighten down security on your server files. Generate a more complicated password and don't make it easy for people to download stuff from your server.
Thank you for your response. I am fully aware that there isn't any court that would even hear the case, and I'm not interested in pursuing that. I still don't know how he got the world, but I'll keep investigating that.
Also, our server is decidedly not vanilla. The only thing I can figure out is that he took the world from an admin who gave it to him. The user who took it just isn't tech-savvy enough to break into a server hosted in a professional datacenter.
I run a small Minecraft server and I've encountered a pretty irritating issue. Every single structure on our server was built by players on the server, and it's all original content- we have a strict rule against ripping off stuff from TV shows, movies, other games, other servers, et cetera.
Today, I found out that one of the many users who was banned from our server has somehow got his hands on an old copy of our map. For all of his complaints about our server, he goes and copies the map...
My question is, has he taken our server's intellectual property by loading our map without permission? If he has, what can I do to prevent him from ripping off our stuff? I take running my server very seriously (probably too seriously, honestly) and I hate to see our ideas get stolen.
Thanks
Ares
Only advice I could give you is to not share your world files if you have done so previously, and tighten down security on your server files. Generate a more complicated password and don't make it easy for people to download stuff from your server.
Also, our server is decidedly not vanilla. The only thing I can figure out is that he took the world from an admin who gave it to him. The user who took it just isn't tech-savvy enough to break into a server hosted in a professional datacenter.
Once again, thank you for your response.
That would be kind of silly for someone to get arrested because they copied a Minecraft world.
PC specs: Intel Core 2 Duo e8500 @ 3.16ghz / XFX Radeon HD 6670 2GB DDR3 / 6GB 1666MHz DDR3 RAM / Windows 7 Professional