But I don't believe this would stand up in court. There was a verbal agreement before he signed a contract. He was paid for his one-off contribution; I don't know how much work he delivered or how many hours he put into it, but 20K is half a year's income for some people, not to be sniffed at.
This has come up recently as well in some drama about voice acting on the one hand, and video game soundtracks on the other. Normally you get paid for the time spent, or the amount of your contributions used. But in the case of the voice actor, they decided the normal amount - or as it turned out later, a chunk well above the normal amount - wasn't enough and they threw it onto the internet.
But in the end, I think this is just a business transaction - one part of one part of the game, paid for with a five figure sum. The author neglected to do his due diligence and neglected to review and sign the contract in a timely fashion. Mojang and Microsoft may be susceptible to a lawsuit because the author never surrendered the rights to his work until now, but his unwillingness to cooperate while accepting payment for work delivered won't work in his favor.
And while he gave the text up into the public domain, I don't know if this holds up in court; iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright. Which means that if the author's copyright is voided, then Microsoft's copyright for Minecraft and all it contains might take over, and they might sue him instead. I'm not a lawyer or versed in copyright law, so this is just fantasizing.
iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright.
Copyright always applies and is automatically assigned at the time of creation. Belongs to the author by default unless created in the context of some other agreement (e.g. work for hire)
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO
The entire post reads like really sour grapes from someone who believes his contribution is way more important than it is. He thinks he deserves a significant higher chunk than what he was paid.
He also acts like he has a leg to stand on and is magnanimously deciding not to bring the hammer down. No. He's going to get laughed out of the lawyer's office. It's not even going to sniff a court. I can imagine what happened.
Markus and Carl were talking with their lawyers about what was needed to facilitate the Microsoft deal. Mojang's lawyers notified them to cases like this, where there's an unsigned contract floating about. They said, get that signed so Microsoft doesn't potentially pull the deal over potential issues. Microsoft, in their due diligence, also had their lawyers combing over Mojang's contracts, assets, and liabilities. Microsoft came across this contract, meetings were had, they found out about the email chain, etc. And Microsoft's lawyers decided this was not an issue. So at that point, Mojang didn't care. Because they didn't have to.
Markus and Carl didn't tell this guy about the deal because it wasn't his business. He was an artist contracted for a bit of poetry. For all intents and purposes, everyone at Mojang considered their business with him over.