Supporters of the state monopoly privilege known as copyright and patent law are very afraid that without a mechanism of forceful punishment for the unauthorized copying and distribution of information content, its creators will simply be left with nothing, pirates will rob them and deprive them of the means of subsistence and the incentive to create new content in the future. Of course, there are dozens of ways to monetize content without using such a privilege, however, we will not analyze them now, but simply look at one practical example that I have known for a long time, but for some reason remembered only very recently. And this example is a game called Minecraft.
The creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson, is a supporter of piracy; he criticizes the attitude towards this phenomenon prevalent in large companies and is even a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden. He has never been against people freely copying and distributing the game he created. However, this did not prevent him from earning 640 million Swedish kronor (about 100 million US dollars) from the sale of licensed copies of the game in 2012 alone, and later selling his stake in the company he founded, Mojang, for 2.5 billion dollars (currently owned by the Microsoft corporation). Minecraft itself became the best-selling game in the world, with about 200 million licensed copies sold by 2020.
Indeed, although Minecraft is officially proprietary software, in reality it is not protected against copying; its files are not encrypted in any way and anyone can download and use them, and this is not even restricted by its current copyright holders (although I am not familiar with their future plans). Access to the official game launcher is only available to players who have purchased a licensed copy, however, a large number of unofficial launchers already exist, and the game itself can be launched without a launcher, simply using the command line. And for unlicensed players, not only single-player but also multiplayer is available. The game server core has a function in its settings which, by disabling it, the server owner can grant connection access to anyone regardless of whether they have a license; therefore, there are many unlicensed servers in the game. And this fact, by the way, also in no way hinders the development of licensed servers and the earnings of their owners.
As we can see, after creating information content, it is entirely possible to get by without forceful privileges. Their absence did not prevent Minecraft from becoming the best-selling game in the world, nor did it stop the game’s creator, Markus Persson, from joining the Forbes billionaires list. There are also many examples of other games that were cracked and posted on torrent trackers even before their official release; nonetheless, the sales of licensed keys did not collapse because of this.
