Luanti pulled from Google Play over a baseless AI copyright claim, then restored

Microsoft's copyright takedown, filed by AI firm Tracer.AI, briefly removed the open source Minecraft-alike Luanti from Google Play before being withdrawn.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

The open source voxel game platform Luanti vanished from Google Play on Thursday after a copyright notice filed on Microsoft's behalf accused it of infringing Minecraft. Microsoft withdrew the notice and the app was restored, but not before the Luanti team spent a day explaining, in detail, why a project that ships no game assets at all cannot plausibly be copying anyone's textures.

According to the Luanti team's blog post, the notice was filed by a company called Tracer.AI and cited a US Copyright Office registration number for Minecraft Java Edition 1.9. The notice did not say which assets were supposedly infringing. Luanti's developers point out that this is because there aren't any: Luanti is a game-creation engine, not a game, and it ships with a small set of deliberately utilitarian placeholder textures used for engine testing. The crafting game it once bundled, Minetest Game, was unbundled back in December 2023 and its assets are, the team says, original and properly licensed.

Why a DMCA notice can take an app down on a hunch

The DMCA, the US law behind the takedown, sets out a notice-and-takedown system that platforms like Google Play use to avoid liability for what their users upload. A rights holder files a claim, the platform removes the content, and the burden shifts to the accused party to counter-notify and get it back. That process does not require the claimant to specify what was copied, which is exactly the gap Luanti's team says Tracer.AI exploited. The blog post notes this is not a first offence: a similar notice hit Luanti in 2023 and was successfully appealed, and Tracer.AI has separately filed against an unrelated indie game called Allumeria, described as sharing “a similar voxel art style”.

Luanti's developers argue that a genre cannot be owned outright. They note that Minecraft itself drew on the 2009 game Infiniminer, and that later block-building games such as Hytale exist in the same space. Microsoft and Mojang, they write, have every right to defend Minecraft's actual assets, but not to use a copyright process to lay claim to blocky voxel games as a category. Luanti began life in 2010 as Minetest, built by a developer known as celeron55 after Minecraft's Alpha release, and was renamed Luanti in 2024.

What this means for open source games on app stores

The practical damage here was contained. Microsoft pulled the notice and the app came back. But the incident is a reminder of how thin the protection is for open source projects that depend on a single storefront. Google's default response to a DMCA claim is removal first, argument later, and an automated brand-protection vendor filing on a rights holder's behalf does not need to show its working before an app disappears. Luanti's team says it is separately looking at automated perceptual hashing to catch genuinely infringing content on its in-app catalogue, ContentDB, but insists any such system would only flag material for human moderators, never make the final call itself.

What remains unclear is exactly how Tracer.AI's tooling decided Luanti infringed Minecraft in the first place, and whether Microsoft reviewed the claim before it went out under its name. Neither point is addressed in the blog post, and there's no comment yet from Microsoft or Tracer.AI referenced in the available reporting. The discussion has moved to a Hacker News thread, where commenters are picking over what automated copyright enforcement means for small, unfunded projects that cannot afford a legal team on retainer.

Sources

Image: Luanti Blog

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