I generally agree. To be honest, I wasn't so much making a general moral judgement about copying. Hamlet was a copy. Bach was a music kleptomaniac. Execution is way more important. I just find minecraft a particularly uncreative copy, and personally like zachatronics - so I 'don't like that he ripped it off'. Which he did. I don't think this dislike could or should extend to other copied pieces of work, games or otherwise.
I like Zachtronics, but I really, really don't get how you view Minecraft as a ripoff of Infiniminer.
Infiniminer is a competitive class-based game in a constrained arena. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponents.
Minecraft is a survival game in an infinite world. The goal is to build a base and progress through a tech tree, or to build things for fun.
Ace of Spades is closer to being a ripoff of Infiniminer, though with more of a focus on combat. Minecraft is a game that has a similar (but more polished) aesthetic but with completely different rules.
Star Wars is not a ripoff of Star Trek just because they're both set in space. They're fundamentally different at every level.
Well, the explanation is probably that I've been taken in by a meme. I should have added a disclaimer that I've not actually played infiniminer a good deal earlier in the thread, and my feeling that Minecraft was derivative was almost entirely based on its timing, visual similarity, and my understanding that the basic mechanic (digging through voxel based terrain) was the same.
An additional factor that made me extra-specially susceptible to this meme is that when I played minecraft, I immediately thought it was essentially a dumbed-down version of dwarf fortress with better graphics. What I saw at the time as the basic innovation - which I think is still what makes dwarf fortress exceptional, is a game that uses a tiling or cubic grid to allow for real creative play, with an attendant focus on mining, survival, and craft.
I don't think Star Wars is a rip-off of star trek, but it absolutely is and was always intended as a derivative work. All the ideas and content was developed in earlier sci-fi. Star Wars was an interesting contribution in terms of execution - and that's exactly why I like it. It had genuinely new ideas about set design and special effects. Minecraft, on the other hand, has no new ideas I can think of.
I still think it's a good game - and I'm very happy that when my kid hits the age where they wanna play games, I can point them to Minecraft and be pretty certain they're not going to be loading naked kidnapped people into a sausage factory (I played GTA2 when I was a kid), or squashing people with tanks, or irradiating them until they turn into mush. I mean, I guess they'll do those things at some point to, but it's nice that there's an actual honest-to-goodness kids game out there that doesn't suck.
It's not even execution, it's luck (and marketing). Minecraft was marketed as a toy, even though 3d modeling tools already existed (I'm assuming) but they were marketed as professional tools for trained artists.
Minecraft wasn't marketed at all, outside of some posts on the Indie Gaming Source dev forums. Its explosive success was entirely word-of-mouth. Of course Microsoft is pushing it all over now that they own it, but it was a megahit long before that happened.
As the old saying goes, "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.