Infiniminer Minecraft - Did Notch steal the idea?

At least one thing is for sure, infiminer minecraft would not exist without each-other.

First to cover some facts.
The name minecraft is similar to infiniminer.
The gameplay of both are very similar.
Textures for the first release were almost identical.
Both featured minecarts and tracks.
Notch said minecraft was inspired by infiniminer.
Both involve digging and building with blocks
Both are procedural generated worlds.



More facts
The owner of infiniminer holds no grudges against notch.
The creater of infiniminer was forced to release his coding as open source as his coding was leaked.

Up for debate
When Minecraft was initially released, the gameplay was very similar to infiniminer and had little extra to offer.
Many say Notch stole a leaked source code to improve the game later on to get glitches out.


What's funny is there are games coming out like Maniac Digger and people are freaking out saying Mojang (the new companies owner) should sue as its a blantant copy of minecraft.

It seems like games continue to build off each other, for instance how many different types of first person shooters are there. Should the person who created the first one sue everyone else? At what point is a game in violation of copyright laws?

 

Hmm, I think that it is a very gray and narrow line between plagiarizing someone else's work and just being inspired by it. In the case of Minecraft I would say that Notch stole the idea if he did just copy the coding from the previous game, change just a few things, and then release it as his own. However, he could have also had a similar idea to Notch in the first place but had just been a little slower in releasing it and in that case he would be stupid to not take advantage of someone else's work, although it is still sketchy cause anyone can claim they came up with the idea but I don't think it would ever work if you tried to do it to something that is already popular.

I guess the real question is not "Did he steal the idea" but "How popular do you have to be before people can't copy you anymore" because now that Minecraft is popular people are freaking out other companies 'copying' it.