Given that ShadMOrdre has raised doubts about the legality of MineClone in regards of Minecraft (
link), I am sharing these informations in the hope that they can be useful to clarify what the United States' law declare to be copyright infringiment. For the sake of clarity and legality, perhaps once and forever.
TL:DR version - LinCity is perfectly legal because it does not use any of SimCity's copyrighted assets, names, etc. therefore MineClone - provided that it doesn't use any MineCraft's copyrighted assets, etc. - is perfectly legal.
These informations are not exactly easy to find, especially if you are not a native English speaker. I have found them while informing myself about the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, the Wizards of The Coast aren't known to be "easy going" on copyright infringiment; so for the sake of simplicity, let's consider Microsoft's attitude toward a copyright infringiment regarding Minecraft, as harsh as the Wizards of The Coast would be.
U.S. Copyright Office:
"Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.
Material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container may be registrable."
"Copyright law does not protect names, titles, or short phrases or expressions. Even if a name, title, or short phrase is novel or distinctive or lends itself to a play on words, it cannot be protected by copyright. The U.S. Copyright Office cannot register claims to exclusive rights in brief combinations of words such as:
Names of products or services
Names of businesses, organizations, or groups (including the names of performing groups)
Pseudonyms of individuals (including pen or stage names)
Titles of works
Catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions
Listings of ingredients, as in recipes, labels, or formulas. When a recipe or formula is accompanied by an explanation or directions, the text directions may be copyrightable, but the recipe or formula itself remains uncopyrightable."
Sources:
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/78159
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions ... ity-scores
Regarding the use of names, example "Gandalf", example "Beholder", example "Luke Skywalker" it must be said that they ARE protected by copyright.
Now it must be said that "Creeper" IS a monster of MineCraft, BUT it is also a synonim of "ivy" - Notch used a pun: "it's creeping ivy" - thus I doubt that "The Creeper" can legally be copyrighted.
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/4 ... n/d25co2i/
To sum up:
Once that a game has been created, example "Poker", you can develop another game based on "Poker", but you can not use "Poker"'s copyrighted elements: its name, its cards' images, and so on.
Else, it would be legal to register patents (copyright) on ideas.
Example: I invent the game "soccer" then register a patent protecting it, protecting the words "Goal", "Corner", and so on.
It would be an obvious absurdity.