GDC 2011: the creator of Minecraft does not consider piracy to be theft

content auto translated from {from}

Markus "Notch" Persson - the creator of the revolutionary Minecraft spoke at the Indie Games Summit, part of GDC, stating that piracy is not theft.

"Piracy is not considered theft simply because downloading a copy of an electronic product does not affect the loss of the original product. If you steal a car, then someone loses material value. There are many things that 'reduce sales,' but they are somehow not considered theft. If a magazine publishes a negative review that lowers the sales of a game, is that considered theft? And why is an expired delivery time not considered theft?"

Many developers supported Persson, emphasizing that the aggressive fight against piracy has become paranoia. Developers often release projects that are unfinished or simply of low quality - why should a buyer pay full price for them? Truly quality games generally do not require special protection - players (even pirates) often buy genuinely worthy hits. An example of this is the phenomenal Minecraft, which sold over 1.3 million copies in less than 3 months, despite the game being freely available for a long time.

Source