This is really interesting to compare both general opinion on HN and on this subreddit.
On HN, a place probably filled with technical guys, people are generaly putting themselves in dev shoes. They are accusing the author of feeling entitled to more money because he felt like he was part of the team and that he think his work is equaly important as the work of everyone else. Devs being devs generaly know that coding is hard and long, and generaly don't know if writing a poem is difficult or not.
On the subreddit, a place probably filled with long time minecraft player, people are putting themselves in the artist shoes. They support the author and are thanking him for creating one of the key moment during a minecraft game : the end.
Rationality versus Emotion. Who is right, who is wrong ? Is anyone right ? Maybe both side are blinded by their beliefs ?
It's a bit sad because I think many here are missing the lesson to be learnt - artists want to be treated as artists (with emotion rather than rationality). When you treat them as cold hearted rational contractors, this kind of mess occurs.
Knowing some superartistic and talented people, I generally agree.
But Mick's case is very different. Mojang did pay, the guy did write, it's just that the guy wanted more than there was there in the informal agreement.
Mick Gordon did sign, idSoftware did not follow the contract, failed to pay on multiple occasions and did not even try to come back to reason in the longer term. Then there's the whole OST story, which is a different kind of evil. Marty Stratton, the producer of the game, played a very dirty game with Gordon with all of the blame shifting and payment problems and that horrible, horrible original reddit post.
I just read that story of Mick Gordon, and man, if even half of that is true, Id massively screwed up. Marty and Id owe Mick a ton of money. It's painful to see Mick constantly return to submit to the abuse because he knows they have more expensive lawyers than he does. Marty shouldn't get to work in this industry ever again after such blatant malicious incompetence.
At least that's my reading of it after first hearing about this issue at all. Maybe there's another side to the story.
What did Mojang pay for though? That appears to be the point of contention.
It sounds like Mojang threw £20k at the author without understanding or articulating what that payment entitled them to.
At a later point they realised they didn't own the actual work itself and tried to strong-arm the author into giving them that ownership for effectively nothing.
At the time Mojang appears to believe that this could be an issue during due diligence. With the amount of money on the table, even offering a life changing sum to the author would have had a nearly imperceptible affect on the overall balance of the acquisition.
He payed, and the writer accepted. That's it. It is a reasonable amount of money for the kind of work that was completed.
Both sides didn't clear up the legal side of things, yes, but it doesn't change the fact that both were OK with it until... until what? What did change? The writer wanted more... money? Recognition?
You haven't answered the question. That Mojang paid some money isn't disputed. What they paid for is the unknown.
> It is a reasonable amount of money for the kind of work that was completed.
Paying to use something isn't the same as paying to own it and from what we know use vs own wasn't clarified at the time.
> Both sides didn't clear up the legal side of things, yes, but it doesn't change the fact that both were OK with it until... until what?
What changed was Mojang trying to strong arm the author into giving them the copyright to the work for free, as part of a due diligence process in a billion dollar deal.
Copyright isn't automatically transferred in most places and it doesn't sound like the author typically agrees to anything other than a license. Mojang failed take action to obtain the copyright until it became obvious that it could hold up their billion dollar acquisition. Mojang then attempted to pressure the author into signing over the copyright for free.
The author clearly believes he granted a license. Mojang seem to have unilaterally decided post-facto that they had purchased the copyright to the work. Mojang's interpretation would be incorrect without prior agreement.
Well, they payed for this text to be included in the game (for further distribution, obviously).
That's a bad legal definition. It needs a clarification which usually comes in a form of a contract.
Mojang clearly acted un-professionally: there's money on the table without a clear job definition. What happens with the copyright? Authorship? Should the author be mentioned in the game? etc.
Same goes to the writer, obviously. Even this post sounds almost... Jealous?
The contract they suggested is a standard document suggested to contractors of the kind in IT. This is not "strong arming". The only thing that changes the discussion is the fact that it happened post-factum. And the text author, having seen the success of the game, is clearly not satisfied with just signing the doc.
He mentions money a lot so, i guess, this is root the problem.
Either way. 99.99% of Minecraft players would still play and enjoy the game with or without this text. It's a nice little touch to a brilliant game, not much beyond it.
> Well, they payed for this text to be included in the game (for further distribution, obviously).
They paid for the deal they agreed on as described in that first email. We don’t know the contents of that email, so it’s impossible for us to know if it they agreed on just including the poem in the game, transfer of copyright or anything else.
Not "almost", he openly admits being jealous (and how it's a bad, in many senses, feeling), how else are we supposed to interpret the monkey and bananas bit ?
> artists want to be treated as artists (with emotion rather than rationality).
That doesn't make any sense. When you treat people with "emotions" ... this is the issue. Emotions are unclear, confusing and are different for everyone. Treating people based on emotions and feelings just results in inequality and confusion for everyone. This the perfect example where if treated it as a rational and business transaction, he would have come out on top. It's his emotions, and the fact that he created some sort of friendship for which he accepted "less" money is his fault. If he treated the issue rationally and sent it to this agent, he would be far happier today.
> If he treated the issue rationally and sent it to this agent, he would be far happier today.
this reasoning carries an implicit assumption (or axiom[1]): "money can buy happiness"
in fact, the argues in the story, that they would probably not have as good as a relationship with their first child if they'd had gotten a lot of money back when all this went down...
[1] what is an axiom? I haven't quite figured it out, but an axiom should never be implicit. so maybe not a good simile[2].
I work in marketing/advertising and hire writers sometimes and I always tell them, “What we’re doing isn’t creative work. You can find a way to do it creatively but it’s not creative. We’re writing for a purpose — to convince someone to do something. It’s not art so don’t think of it as art.”
I’ve found this to be very effective in avoiding writers who want to be thought of as artists.
It's also worth noting that the reddit post is a text post which links to the blog post, and the text post content is a lot less negative than the blog post, so it's plausible that people on reddit are mostly reacting to the text post and not reading the blog post.
I've noticed as a general trend that Reddit comments tend to be more positive, whereas HN tends to be more critical. On the one hand critical comments can enhance discussion by introducing opposing perspectives, on the other hand they have the danger of lacking empathy or being overly cynical.
In this particular case I see the value of both sides. I sympathize with the writer and think he did a good thing releasing his work into the public domain, yet I also agree with comments that his contract was more reasonable than he makes it out to be.
HN is also filled with more entrepreneurial guys, so viewing this purely as a financial transaction makes sense from that point of view. HN is the sidecar to a venture capital accelator, not a tech company like, say, JetBrains.
I think people (and tech people especially, but also many entrepreneurs) like to misuse "rationality vs emotion" as a false dichotomy because it allows framing yourself as "rational" and therefore "correct" and the other side as "emotional" and therefore "flawed". In reality no human being is truly rational and by contrasting ourselves with "emotional" people we just end up mistaking callousness or cynicism for rationality.
Yes, it's unreasonable to expect a corporation to consider "emotional" factors and the author acknowledges this when talking about Microsoft, but when talking about early Mojang that's not Mojang, that's Notch personally. Arguably there may have been different understandings of the relationship but it's perfectly reasonable (or "rational"?) to expect human-to-human interactions to follow different rules than business-to-business ones involving a corporation.
Everyone involved in making Minecraft happen contributed to its success, not just the core team and him as an external one-off contributor but literally even the office cleaning staff and the retail workers of the shops those people frequented and so on. It's practically fractal in that if you pick any arbitrarily distant point and consider how things would have worked out if you cut off and isolate everything on either side of it, Minecraft couldn't have happened or at least not as successfully as it did.
But this complexity is too overwhelming when you need to put a dollar amount to every contribution so it's natural to make the cut-off happen much closer and a natural fault line is employees vs external contributors or continuous contributors vs one-time contributors. But that isn't rationality. That's just the limitations of the economic system based around the exchange and control of money as capital.
I think it is pretty clear what kind of world most people would want to live in, and it is not the one where the faceless giant has more power. HN has things going for it, but corporate pandering is unquestionably not one of them.
A lot of people here are saying he was paid “for a poem”, as if it’s a fungible piece of text and not a meaningful part of the experience providing meta-narrative closure to the game.
For anyone buying one of the posters, t-shirts, totes, etc. with the text of the poem or a part of it, it means a lot.
“May the force be with you” could have been anything else, and Star Wars wouldn’t be anything less than it is… yet, it’s an invaluable bit of writing!
On HN, a place probably filled with technical guys, people are generaly putting themselves in dev shoes. They are accusing the author of feeling entitled to more money because he felt like he was part of the team and that he think his work is equaly important as the work of everyone else. Devs being devs generaly know that coding is hard and long, and generaly don't know if writing a poem is difficult or not.
On the subreddit, a place probably filled with long time minecraft player, people are putting themselves in the artist shoes. They support the author and are thanking him for creating one of the key moment during a minecraft game : the end.
Rationality versus Emotion. Who is right, who is wrong ? Is anyone right ? Maybe both side are blinded by their beliefs ?