The issue is you're paying money to a third party for mojang's work, more precisely something which you have already paid for by purchasing the game. If you ignore the game itself and look at it from a purely technical view, what people are essentially doing is running code on their own servers (Which is allowed) but then charging people for bits of the code written by mojang (Which is not allowed).

For most private servers you see, they will have a list of "donation" amounts and a "reward" for each, however this is quite clearly a sale since you are exchanging a commodity for money. To be classed as a donation, you would need to donate money without the requirement of something in return.

I think Mojang are clearly right here, but not to the advantage of the minecraft community.

> you're paying money to a third party for mojang's work

Most servers are run using Bukkit [1] which is licensed under GPL [2]. The client and the protocols are Mojang's but the server's code is free to modify without such restrictions.

[1] http://bukkit.org/ [2] https://github.com/Bukkit/Bukkit/blob/master/LICENCE.txt

> ...paying money to a third party for mojang's work

Is this really the case though? Aren't these people paying for a specific economy type created in game? they could go play any number of free servers or run their own, but they choose to play a P2W server. The server ops are really charging money for the service of the in game economy being micromanaged.

The players did pay mojang already to have access to everything, it's not like someone is required to play on a private server. I don't see how it's an issue if the players are choosing to pay a server operator for offering a specific service

What's wrong with charging to expose functionality on a server you own, just because that functionality involves code written by somebody else?

For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.

Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.

Every program makes use of the OS. You literally couldn't do anything without using the OS.