For usage rights, probably so. But a transfer has stricter requirements in most countries, and it doesn't mean he agreed to all the other clauses in the contract that he hadn't even seen at the time.
I'm not sure the contract is even legal. In the EU "moral rights" cannot be signed away, and in many EU countries they cannot even be waived. From what I understand, in Sweden they can only be waived in limited, specific ways, and the contract Julian posted demands he waive everything he can.
Whether it's legal or not it's extremely dodgy. It's pretty much a demand of unconditional surrender. And we know C418 got better terms than these, since he retains copyright to his music.
Yeah, I don't understand how this could've taken more than a couple of e-mails when the work was already done. Why the heck wouldn't Julian ask Markus to step in once he became uncomfortable with e-mailing Carl? Why didn't he just say "ok this took me X hours, so X euros is fair compensation"?
It's very hard for me to read this in a way where Julian doesn't come off as, at best, an idiot, and at worst, an asshole who thinks writing two pages of text is equivalent to the thousands of hours of labor the five Mojang employees had put into the project at the time.
