After coming with the idea, building a first final version (which looked awesome), putting the website up and starting accepting orders; only then it crossed my mind that I might be infringing on Mojang’s (developers of Minecraft) intellectual property. I submitted the website to Minecraft’s subreddit to see if it got some visits out of that and it got quickly shut down by moderators, pointing at this very fact. It was the first time anyone had brought it up and it made me thinking they might be right.
I contacted Mojang on Twitter and by e-mail and after two weeks I finally got an answer through their Branding Guidelines:
You may not make any other commercial use of the Minecraft Brand or Minecraft Assets for example you may not sell any merchandise that uses the Minecraft Brand or Minecraft Assets. If you upload videos of the game to video sharing and streaming sites (like YouTube) you are however allowed to put ads on them.
That pretty much sums it up. Apparently they’re not open either to any kind of partnership at this point.
A few days after I put the website up they also announced Minecraft Papercraft Studio for iOS, which even if you can’t print out a flower like ours with it, it’s still a move in the same direction. If you like Minecraft and things made out of paper you should definitely check it out.
After talking to Mojang they said they’re cool with us doing this if we change the design of the flower “enough”. I don’t know how much is enough but if it means it doesn’t look like the one in Minecraft then there’s no point in doing this in my opinion. Anyway, I might still retake this endeavour at some point but for now it stays the way it is: I’m not accepting any orders, although you can download high resolution images of the flower for free from the website (at the bottom).
Stay tuned for the next experiment 😉
