I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work. But I don't think it's clear whether he has the rights to the work or not.
> But I don't think it's clear whether he has the rights to the work or not.
He owns the copyright, hasn't transferred the copyright, he clearly owns the rights in the work.
> I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work.
I think you're right that there's an implied license for them to use it but the scope of that license was never specified and I'd guess a clever lawyer could make reasonable hay from the case that it's now much broader than he wanted.
Can you quote the bit of the article which says that? All I can see is that he said "ok, what's your offer?", Carl returned with "€20k", and "in all the confusion someone sent me the money, even though we still didn’t have a contract worked out" - no contract, no license.
“and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was.”
Edit: I’m rate limited, but Microsoft doesn’t need a transfer. They bought the entire company. Just like you buying some shares on the stock exchange, except they bought all of the shares in a private transaction. Had they done an asset purchase instead, your point might be valid.
Which is an implied contract, yes. Which a court would probably find that Mojang have an implied license to use the poem, yes.
But the terms of that license are unknown - a court may well decide that it did not apply to Microsoft since he didn't sign that contract. And it also means that he did not assign copyright to Mojang or Microsoft which removes that avenue of them claiming they can use it for free.
Ready his comment again. It does not matter because Mojang still exists, it's just a Microsoft-owned company now. The contract and everything else related to the game is still property of Mojang, nothing has been transferred.
A court may well consider that becoming a wholly owned subsidiary would violate a license, despite being a distinct legal entity[1][2]. Especially when it's just an implied license with no actual agreed definition on both sides.
[1] Which is similar to what we're seeing with ARM vs Qualcomm and it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.
You’ve linked an article about a doctrine specific to patent law. Does not apply here. Also, it only speculates that it might be in issue in an acquisition of a subsidiary (vs. a direct merger).
So? He let them use it in the game in exchange for $20k. That’s all they want or need. And before you start with this tiresome license transfer crap, please take a second to read this whole thread to see why that’s not relevant.
