liquidbounce.net is back online. It was down since October 17 because of a DMCA notice that did not say what it was about. Here is what happened, what we changed, and why we brought the site back.
What happened
On October 16, Cloudflare received a DMCA notice about liquidbounce.net. It was sent by Tracer, a company that uses AI to find and take down content for brands, on behalf of Microsoft, which owns Mojang.
The notice named exactly two things:
- Reported URL: our homepage, liquidbounce.net
- Original work: minecraft.net, the whole site
No file, no image, no page, no line of code. The field for evidence was empty.
Cloudflare passed the notice on to OVHcloud, the hoster of the server behind our website. OVHcloud then suspended that server for "Hacked", which caused a disruption in our services.
We took liquidbounce.net offline right away and replied to both Cloudflare and OVHcloud. We asked for what every valid DMCA notice has to contain: the exact location of the material and the copyrighted work it supposedly infringes.
We are not the first
Tracer has sent notices like this before. This year alone:
- The indie game Allumeria was pulled from Steam over a notice that compared one of its screenshots with one from minecraft.net. PC Gamer reported that it named no "specific similarities beyond using voxels".
- The open-source game engine Luanti was pulled from Google Play, for the second time after 2023. The Luanti team called it a "baseless DMCA notice".
Microsoft withdrew both notices.
What we changed
LiquidBounce is a Fabric mod for Minecraft, so our website will always talk about Minecraft. Mojang itself says that "modding is at the heart of Java Edition" and even removed the obfuscation to make modding easier.
Still, we went through the whole site ourselves and changed everything that showed Mojang's own content:
- Homepage background: the gameplay video is gone. The homepage now runs the same animated background as the LiquidBounce main menu, live in your browser.
- Homepage screenshots: replaced with current ones from our documentation: the main menu, the ClickGUI, the HUD on our test server with shaders, and the version picker in the multiplayer menu. The X-Ray screenshot with plain Minecraft terrain is gone.
- Old files: the gameplay videos and the old screenshots are deleted from the server, not just hidden.
- Skin preview: the Premium and cosmetics pages showed Mojang's default skin, Steve, until you entered a username. They now show the skin of our LiquidBounce account.
- Footer: every page now carries Mojang's own disclaimer: "NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT PRODUCT. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT."
Why the site is back
After our own review and these changes, we decided to bring liquidbounce.net back online. We found nothing on the site that infringes Mojang's copyright, and the notice gave us nothing else to check.
What happens next
We cannot guarantee anything. We are still waiting for a reply from Mojang, and the site could go offline again if another notice like this arrives. We hope we can resolve this without any legal fights.
A request to Mojang
If something on our website really is a problem, tell us. Send a proper notice that names the exact page and the work it is about, as the DMCA requires, and we will review it and remove anything that actually infringes.
A notice that only points at our homepage and "minecraft.net" does not let anyone fix anything. It only takes a website offline.
Questions? Ask us on our Discord.