Last I heard at least, he still seem to regard mods to Minecraft as some bad terrible thing (though apparently Jeb has at least gotten him to go along with a mod framework--which is a good thing, because it's the only way Minecraft remains playable!), so "I doubt he'll complain" might be reaching a bit.

My impression was that Notch is fine with mods, but he just doesn't think there's a way to make Minecraft very moddable without effectively open-sourcing it, which he doesn't want to do.

There's not might - without a license, even the Github mirror made by Rich is infringing.

Actually, isn't he still in Sweden? In that case, I have no idea if computer software is automatically copyrighted the moment it's written. I think maybe that's a US-only thing?

Sweden signed the Berne Convention [1] in 1904 [2], and has automatic copyright since at least then

They also signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty [3] in 2002, which expclitly says that computer programs are to be treated as literary works, and receive the same protection (that has been implemented by the DMCA in the US).

According to Directive 2006/116/EC [4] the copyright term in the EU for literary works up to 70 years after the author died. If life expectancy continues to increase, they will probably extend the term again to cover the intended 2 generations.

Have fun playing your copy on vintage hardware then :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Prote... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty [4]: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...: