The Problem with Stolen Content on the Minecraft Marketplace

On the minecraft bedrock edition home screen there’s a tab titled marketplace in the marketplace you can find so many add-ons to the game ranging from skins to texture packs to even entire maps and mini-games and most of these are just made by regular people who work with studios to publish them to the

Marketplace just like with any online store user generated content is obviously going to come with its knock-offs bootlegs and stuff that’s a straight-up stolen and the minecraft marketplace is no stranger to any of that the issue here though is that microsoft doesn’t really seem to want to

Do anything about it and in just the past month there have been multiple high profile incidents involving stolen content on the marketplace in this video i’m going to discuss some of these and explain how they happened show you some of the dumbest stolen content i could find on the marketplace and talk about

Why microsoft refuses to do anything about these interested let’s get started alright so stolen content on the marketplace has been around forever pretty much at this point it’s almost a meme go on the marketplace and type among us in the search bar and tell me what you find this type of stuff started

Showing up when among us was blowing up in popularity over a year ago and absolutely nothing was done about it now obviously inner sloth is probably gonna focus more on updating their game than copyright claiming minecraft skins that are being sold but the fact that minecraft and microsoft aren’t doing

Anything about it and are essentially allowing it is really surprising either way though bootleg minecraft skins aren’t really the main focus of this video like i said at the beginning there have been some extremely high profile incidents regarding stolen content on the marketplace recently one of those involved probably the most popular

Texture pack of all time called faithful there’s a 20 minute video by ant venom on the full story and i would highly recommend going and watching that if you want to know all of what happened but if you’d just like a quick synopsis here you go faithful was a texture pack

Created by a minecraft player known as vatic it was first introduced in late 2010 and was maintained and updated all the way until version 1.8 or around 2014. after that however vatic disappeared from the internet for personal reasons and faithful no longer got updates that was until someone named

Vizzy stepped in and started updating it for newer versions on his own he eventually started a team which would create updates for faithful together and eventually started calling faithful his own no one in the community knew any wiser because there were screenshots that showed vatic allegedly transferring

Ownership of faithful over to visi vizi even went as far as to listing faithful on the minecraft marketplace under his own name for purchase with minecoins you know the premium currency that you can buy with real money in late 2020 however some drama went down within the faithful

Team and some members reached out to vatic to try and get him back in the community again to their surprise vatic actually responded and quickly found out that his work had been stolen the screenshots that showed vatic giving the rights of faithful to vizzy turned out

To be fake and vatic was not happy to hear that his work had not only been stolen but was also being sold for real money now again all this was found out through the video that ant venom made a little under a month ago and literally

As i was in the process of making this video the pack finally got removed from the marketplace but still the fact that it took almost a month from it initially being reported on and which legal proceedings could have happened before the video as well it just seems like

Minecraft might have been dragging their feet a little bit on the issue from talking to people that had bought the pack they didn’t get a refund for it either instead they got to keep faithful and it’s fair consolation but i know some people would have wanted refunds as

Well i’ll talk about this more later in the video still there’s also been another fairly high profile incident regarding stolen content on the marketplace recently it’s called the aether dimension and it was originally a mod for minecraft java edition it’s been worked on since the early 2010s and

Recently it was just straight up stolen and put on the marketplace without permission this was verified when king b dogs the creator of the aether and a literal developer for minecraft tweeted that this wasn’t approved by him and that the people that put it on the marketplace were making money off of

Copied content as of making this video the aether dimension is literally on the front page and one of the first results on the minecraft marketplace i get that the stuff there might just be placed by an algorithm based on what’s getting the most clicks and interest at the moment

But the fact that stolen content is making it to the front page of the minecraft marketplace without anything being done to it is just so surprising now i wouldn’t be surprised if action gets taken on this pretty quickly just because it’s affecting someone that works within minecraft but these two

Incidents the faithful texture pack and the aether dimension aren’t the only examples of stolen or bootleg or knockoff content making it onto the marketplace and doing well i mean like i mentioned earlier there’s countless among us knockoff skin packs you can find the most popular of which is made

Over ten thousand us dollars by the way i got my numbers for that based on the amount of public reviews that there are for it there’s gonna be so many other people that just forgot or didn’t feel like leaving a review on it which means that they’ve made a lot more than ten

Thousand dollars actually but let’s just take a look at some of the related items for we among us imposters are among us is the name of one of them and just by looking at the thumbnail of it i can spot knock off tommy in it dream and technoblade skins in it looking even

Further you can find knockoff skins of george not found rambu filza tubbo and i think you can see the problem here but there’s countless other examples of things exactly like this in the marketplace green team dream team green dream try saying that three times fast

And the list just goes on and on and on i get that it’s gonna be a lot harder to copyright a skin in minecraft but at the same time you would think there would at least be some semblance of quality control on the marketplace or at least someone who manually looks over the

Content being submitted to realize that hey this is just a blatant cash grab profiting off of someone else’s intellectual property but apparently minecraft isn’t able to do that either according to mark watson someone who works at mojang and someone who used to be on the marketplace team it’s up to

The marketplace partners basically the people who produce the content that goes on the marketplace to quality control themselves and only upload content that they have the rights to he also includes a link to be able to report infringing content but you can only report if you own the content that’s being infringed

Upon there’s not really much the community can do here beyond call it out but i feel like anyone can realize that getting content creators to self-police their own content is going to get abused though once again according to mark there is a certification process where you do have to meet some standards in

Order to be able to post content to the marketplace but then once you’re past that there doesn’t seem to be all that much of a quality control process your content has to work and display properly and all of that but mark literally says that there aren’t artistic judgments

Going on which basically takes all responsibility off of minecraft assuming it’s not inappropriate or illegal but let’s think back to the certification process that was mentioned while it’s difficult to find any specifics on it it can be reasonably assumed that you just need to demonstrate that you can create

Content that works and that will appeal to players let’s take a look at s and dbx the people who made the stolen 8th dimension before the 8th they just made regular maps and mods like skyblock maps and some tool mods all of these are relatively common on the marketplace

Just because they’re what people like to play you can kind of assume that these are things that you create just to get more standing in the community and seem more legit then just recently they released their eighth of dimension making over four thousand dollars off it

At the time of recording this if you go look at other marketplace studios you’ll see a lot of them doing the same thing as well some skyblock maps some stolen content in between that just seems to be how a lot of the marketplace works nowadays now if you think about it what

Reason does minecraft have to remove this stolen content beyond the possibility of a copyright claim honestly not all that much minecraft and microsoft get a cut of every purchase made with minecoins and with the amount of stolen content that you can find on the marketplace and some of it being

Quite popular minecraft is making more money with that stuff on the marketplace than it is without but even if minecraft were to remove stolen content off the marketplace it becomes pretty messy for them to sort out what happens afterwards like i mentioned earlier faithful finally got removed from the marketplace

But some people want refunds for it now they realize that they purchased something that was stolen are they gonna get those refunds i highly doubt it while it’s a difficult situation all around i think this kind of sets the precedent that yeah you’re not getting your money back from microsoft if

Something gets taken off the marketplace in the little wood even asked what happens to the money the players spend in the situation and probably did not get a response to his question which just further shows that you’re not getting your money back in the situation just keep that in mind when buying stuff

In the future with the history of stolen content showing up on the marketplace without so much as an extra thought and with the two more high-profile incidents of stolen content either being on the marketplace for way too long or just not being taken down i think it’s safe to

Say that there’s a pretty big problem with the marketplace at the moment don’t get me wrong it’s a really good vehicle for minecraft creators to get paid for their work and i obviously hope the situation gets better but with the track record of how things have been and the

Fact that we have first-hand sources of what it takes to publish content on the marketplace and armed with the knowledge that minecraft makes money off of all of this i honestly don’t see things changing all that much minecraft bedrock is still almost certainly the future of minecraft but with how things have been

Going right now i’m not sure if that’s a good thing we’ve still got issues like the pink glitch in minecraft bedrock edition which affects console and pc users that have been highly publicized and highly reported on the bug tracker and nothing has been done about it i’d recommend going and watching the video

That just showed up on screen if you want to know more about that but that’s gonna be it for this video so thank you all for watching and i will see you in the next one peace out