I personally think that those who don't understand minecraft / manic digger success never played (or enjoyed) Lego.

In my opinion is not as much of who came first, but who ran with it the best, For all anyone knows, some guy might of came up with the photoelectric effect but never published it, While Eistein won the noble prize for it, There are no real "original ideas" anymore, everything is a derivitive of another.
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Most if not all human knowledge is advanced by building off the knowledge discovered by someone else--that's how all of science advances.
It's pretty interesting that calculus was independently discovered by two individuals (pretty interesting actually http://en.wikipedia....Calculus#Modern ).

I see no problem with building off of someone else's work so long as you acknowledge that you did so (and as far as I can tell Notch freely admits Minecraft's origins). If you invent super happy funball and don't do anything with it and if someone else invents super happy funball and becomes a billionaire, that was just a missed opportunity. And besides, history is fickle--a good idea may not take off right away--an inventor ahead of his time can and does happen frequently

I don't like the "game" of MC ... I'd rather just build ala LEGOs and I could totally see it as a MMO construction kit. "Insert mob here, add quest-giver NPC there, add treasure-key item here, build mega-fort-castle there, add king NPC, etc ..."