How much money have I lost because of this? Do I need it? God knows I certainly work hard enough to deserve it. That said, thanks for making the world a better place.

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'... Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?

Do you think the sales that you've made through pirate versions are worth the number of downloads? I know I bought the real Minecraft after testing it out via. pirate software, as I do with most worthwhile software.

This is an extremely interesting question. For a game like Minecraft, I definitely believe it's at least broken even because the game has quite a long lifespan and has viral aspects in that people enjoy sharing what they create in and with the game. More users means more talking about the game, which means more sales.

For other games, I think piracy can definitely negatively affect the total number of units sold. This is especially true for hollywood style big story heavy big productions that are only expected to sell well and stay in the public conscience for a few months. That still doesn't mean anyone has actually LOST any money, as a bad review also can affect the total number of sales, and hopefully nobody thinks it would be sane to sue magazines for "loss of profit" over bad reviews.

And for a few games where there's a per-user cost, piracy can definitely be directly harmful to the company.

For what? Pirating the game?

I strongly believe individual rights are much more important than corporate rights, and I consider piracy to be an extremely minor offense. It's less harmful than jaywalking.

Organized and business run copyright infringement where people try to make money of someone else's work is a problem, but people sharing stuff casually is just barely even worth talking about...

Greetings Pirate Bay!

This is 2 Player Productions here, and we hoped we could be the first to upload our new movie "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". We've never uploaded a torrent before so hopefully this isn't all screwed up.

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We've been there. We've all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don't have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you're pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell's words, "a service problem," please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please.

We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We love the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you buy the movie, you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted this movie in the first place was that we didn't have enough money to make it ourselves, and even then, we still put A LOT of our own money into it. Not to mention nearly two years of work.

Watch the movie. Hopefully you'll like it, and understand what we're trying to do. Please consider supporting us by buying the $8 DRM-free digital download of the movie at www.theminecraftmovie.com, or the $20 DVD from www.fangamer.net.

We've worked with a lot of amazing people in the games industry and had the incredible fortune to make some great films the way we wanted to make them. Please consider helping us continue on this path. The best has yet to come.

-2pp

But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve.

A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?

Notch is well known for not worrying too much about piracy or believing in "lost sales", and the staggering success of Minecraft speaks for the wisdom of that attitude. It also goes to show that, despite what critics claim, accepting the reality of piracy doesn't mean letting any and all activity run rampant. When you threaten people, or send lawyers after them, they might get scared but they will definitely get defensive (and not like you very much). But by reaching out to the guy, notch had a friendly exchange and the pirate site came down (plus what I assume will be an epic Quake battle on q3dm17, which I gather from Google is some sort of badass space platform map). Are there other pirates who would have ignored notch or set up shop elsewhere? Probably—but they will always find a way to do what they do. Indeed, some people will always be jerks/idiots/dumb kids too, as some of the reactions to the disappearance of the site showed—which notch recognizes, so he took it in stride:

It sucks that some people are like that, but attacking them sure isn't going to change them. It's a waste of time, and can cause people to threaten and drive away pirates like the one with whom notch reached a friendly resolution.

Remember that scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion chose a trial by battle in the Eyrie? Well, let’s do that instead!

I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.

If we win, you drop the lawsuit.

If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.

First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is.

About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register “Minecraft” as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for “Scrolls”, the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like “Scrolls”, but we sent in the application anyway.

(Disclosure: We’ve enforced the trademark for Minecraft once, when there was a minecraft clone on iOS, using our name. People were emailing me saying our iOS version was buggy and bad, so we asked them to change the name of their game, and they did.)

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. I agree that the word “Scrolls” is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.

The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell.

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'... Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?

If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week.

A lot of big companies try to make piracy like theft; I wouldn't steal a car, but I would 'steal' a good design. If I liked another person's apartment, I would try to make mine look like someone else's... but that's not stealing.

Minecraft has been talked about before on Techdirt. Back in November, deadmau5 set up his own server for this sandbox-game in which players can craft their own world. His fans love it, and deadmau5 regularly pops in to hang out with them in 'mau5ville.' In a way, both deadmau5 and his fans emerge themselves in fan art. There are tons of videos of mau5ville online, so you can take a tour. One user even used the game's tools to make a cover of a song by deadmau5, which deadmau5 then shared with over 2 million of his fans. Other artists sometimes prefer to go the way of a takedown notice when a fan puts his energy into making fan art -- but deadmau5 prefers to promote it. You can see both videos below:

However, deadmau5 is not like other artists, and recently he showed this by buying about 20 Minecraft accounts and posting the gift codes on his Facebook page. He understands that having fun with your fanbase and spending a little money on it can be much more important than telling them to buy your music. He listens to his fans, and he informs them when they can buy new music, because that's what his fans want. But it's about more than just pushing what you have to buy.

In the beginning of December, deadmau5' marketing team decided they should get involved in communicating to his fans.

Apparently deadmau5 didn't like the fact that his management was disturbing the trust and rapport he had built up with the ecosystem, because those status updates were followed by deadmau5's:

 Then he checked the backend of his Facebook page…

Excellent choice, in my opinion. This is the best thing he could do to earn back the trust of the ecosystem, because you really don't want to get on the bad side of the ecosystem. The ecosystem can reject you, the ecosystem can move on, the ecosystem doesn't need YOU in order to survive.

And the cool thing is, he wasn't thinking about marketing or self-preservation or strategy in the process of making his choices. It's just him, genuinely. And I guess the status update he posted 1 minute later shows just that:

It looks like deadmau5 recognizes his fans have more value than just a few purchases. Instead of complaining that his fans should buy his album for 15 euros, he is actually buying them Minecraft accounts for 15 euros a piece. This might be hard to understand for his management and a lot of other people in the industry, because if fans are free, how can they have value?

Why? Under US copyright law, a replica of a fictional design like a spaceship could be considered a "derivative work," meaning it is protected by the same copyright that protects Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Viacom owns the Star Trek copyright.  If they decide to sue Halkun, the fact that he spent 10 (or 100) hours making his replica, that it's made out of digital blocks, or that he doesn't plan to make money on it may or may not protect him. Either way, in order to find out, he would have to hire a legal team to go up against Viacom.  That's a hard (not to mention expensive) way to find out that your USS Enterprise model does not infringe on anyone's copyright.

Who else might be in hot water? The way Minecraft works, if you want to play the game with a group of your friends (or strangers), you have to set up your own server. Let's say Halkun builds a replica of Hogwarts from Harry Potter (which, by the way, would be awesome) on your server.   In that case, you could be sued for secondary infringement just for running the server that contains this "infringing" content.

If you think that media lawyers have better things to do than sue you for modeling an imaginary magical castle, you're (unfortunately) mistaken. In 2007, J.K. Rowling sued for $50,000 because someone made a papier-mache replica of Hogwarts' exterior. At a religious festival in India.

In this video he demonstrates a city-sized, fully-functional arithmetic logic unit, or ALU. The ALU is one of the fundamental building blocks of a central processing unit (CPU), responsible for performing arithmetic and logical operations.

Now that the ALU is complete, the creator plans to continue building the rest of the computer, starting with the memory. Once it's done he hopes to make the computer will run code based on the "Hack" machine described in the book The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles.

Just in case you aren't clear here, the man is building a working computer inside a computer game using a textbook as his guide.