US District Court: Game Elements In Tetris Clone Infringe Tetris Co.'s Copyright 138
elegie writes "In the US, a District Court has ruled that the Tetris clone "Mino" infringes the Tetris Company's copyrights with regard to elements of the Tetris game design and gameplay. On one hand, a lawyer said that 'a puzzle game where a user manipulates blocks to form lines which disappear' would be noninfringing. At the same time, the Mino game's reuse of such Tetris elements as the dimensions of the playing field and the shape of the blocks constituted infringement. In addition, the Tetris game's artistic elements were not inseparably linked to the underlying mechanics and replicating an underlying idea and/or functionality (which would likely be uncopyrighted) would not justify copying visual expression from an existing game."
Oh good (Score:5, Funny)
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easy, make your own shapes, colors, dimensions and game play. instead of falling have them come in from all directions.
there have been so many Sim City/Civilization clones over the years and each one has been unique. it just takes a little work
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Tetris itself is not new. It's based on a very old Russian toy/puzzle.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Informative)
Tetris itself is not new. It's based on a very old Russian toy/puzzle.
Source, please.
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/smmg/archive/1997/radin.html [utexas.edu]
It may not be Russian, but polyomino tiling puzzles are at least 100 years old.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris [wikipedia.org]
Come on, it's in the very first line.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Informative)
easy, make your own shapes, colors, dimensions and game play. instead of falling have them come in from all directions.
there have been so many Sim City/Civilization clones over the years and each one has been unique. it just takes a little work
I think you need to read the history of Tetris [wikipedia.org] to understand the irony of the situation.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, all they had to do was come up with their own arrangements of 4 square block pieces.
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Good thing there are more possible tetrominoes than the ones used in Tetris.
wait, hang on.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Informative)
The Tetris pieces are just tetrominos [wikipedia.org] - they're every possible shape you can create by joining four squares together. You can't come up with your own similar shapes because there aren't any more of them.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm afraid "four" is not a complex or original enough concept to warrant intellectual property protection.
three would yield a total of 2 possible shapes, and five yields 24 shapes, which quickly makes things unwieldy and complex. Using tetrominoes rather than pentominoes or triominoes is an obvious decision for anyone skilled in the field of game design.
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The summary tells you what you need to change - just how much spoon feeding do you need?
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Wrong. Copyright's intention is to SPUR innovation. It does that by telling people 'if you invent something, it is yours. We will prevent others from doing the same thing for a period of time'. Yes, you could of course retroactively cancel the copyrights, but then you lose the whole thing that copyrights are supposed to provide.
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When copyrights are 75 years after death they don't spur innovation, they encourage the copyright holder to rent seek, and not develop new stuff. If you buy into the theory that creators main motivation for creating is money then giving the best ones a lifetime supply for one creation just removes that motivation.
When an 38 year old game stops someone writing a similar game you loose the whole point of copyright.
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When an 38 year old game stops someone writing a similar game you loose the whole point of copyright
So what you are saying is there is still value in the 38 year old game, but for some random reason you've deemed the original creator should get nothing else for it?
While I think that 75 years after death is too long, I'm not really sure how long the copyright should be.
But in this particular case the copyright is over the playfield and the squarness shape?
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Now, there very well may be some people who create something and live off it for the rest of their lives without creating another thing. So what? If someone creates something so wonderful/critical/popular that it still generates income 50 years later why shouldn't they benefit from that? What if that work was the only idea they had? Shortening copyright sure isn't going to make them come up with another idea. What if they didn't really enjoy the process of creating that work, or found it too demanding to do so - how is a shorter copyright going to help that? Do you think that somehow people who create things are incapable of ever doing anything else, so by limiting copyright you will somehow force them to create more? Furthermore, what if they created that work that everyone just has to have solely for the purpose of living off it for the rest of their life? Would the world be better off not having that work at all?
I don't care about any of that except the bit at the end. The idea, boiled down a lot, is to 'pay' in terms of granting copyright protection, as little as possible while still getting the work. If the author would have created the work in exchange for a 5 year term, granting anything beyond that is wasteful and incurs a needless cost at public expense. There are ways to tailor copyright terms to try to minimize the amount granted while still being enough to incentivize the author into creating and publishin
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Who are these 'rent seekers' who have only one copyrighted work?
Adolf Hitler?
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Ok, so how does having copyright last until 75 years AFTER THE DEATH of the author benefit the author?
The question is not how it benefits them after the fact. The question is: does the possibility of earning royalties after death affect the likelihood of creators spending the effort to create their work. And the simple fact is, yes (as much as any revenue possibility does), because people have an instinctive desire to provide for their children. Now, 75 years is probably longer than actually has any useful effect (I'd guess that about 40 years is roughly the limit beyond which it makes no difference at a
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No, actually.
Remember, creative works are like the lottery: there are many works, but the vast majority have no copyright-related value ever. Of the remainder, a tiny few have some copyright-related value, but usually not too much, and not for too long. The timeframe differs depending on the type of work (a daily newspaper is worthless in less than 24 hours, a decent movie usually has a few years) but in general it's astonishingly rare to have a work that is still got copyright-related value about 10-15 yea
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Yes, but you're assuming that content creators act rationally. In reality, everyone assumes that the work they produce is going to be one of the rare cases that continues earning for a long period, however unrealistic this may be. And it doesn't matter from a legislative perspective what the reality is: the only question is what stimulates artists to create. And outside of the minority that would create even if there were no possibility of financial reward, length of copyright terms after death is actual
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the only question is what stimulates artists to create.
Indeed. Term lengths dramatically increased in 1978 due to the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act. Why then did we not see a surge of creative works created and published which, but for the term extension, would not have been? AFAICT advances in technology and societal changes are responsible for the increase in the quantity of creative works created and published since then, which presumably would've happened anyway.
Beyond a fairly short period of time, I don't think that it actually does stimulate authors.
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Wrong. Copyright's intention is to SPUR innovation. It does that by telling people 'if you invent something, it is yours. We will prevent others from doing the same thing for a period of time'.
No. Copyright's purpose is to encourage the creation and publication of certain creative works, which otherwise would not have been created and published, while causing no or minimal harm to the public due to restrictions on the use of said works, such that the net benefit to the public is greater than if there were no copyright.
It's got nothing to do with innovation. Creative works need to be original and creative, not innovative. Dull-as-dishwater works which, while possessing a modicum of creativity, do
deja vu (Score:1)
Not a good precedent (Score:2, Interesting)
The Tetris Co. has been pushing very, very hard for this decision for years, and it's a bad one for everyone except Tetris Co. Where does this begin and end - is Activision going to sue everyone for making a team-based playing-soldiers first person shooter, because it infringes on the Call of Duty copyright? In fact how does this translate to the copyrighting of 'real life' game concepts and other similar idea-based concepts? Are we going to be able to patent games now?
This is a very, very bad precedent.
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Not really. You see, Tetris is a very simple game, there's no hidden levels of depth to it. It's blocks falling and you arrange them to make lines that disappear.
There does not need to be more games involving blocks that fall and need to be arranged into lines so they disappear.
Call of Duty, though, can have different stories to tell in the campaign, can have different mechanics for weapons, different maps, multiplayer options, squad sizes. There's plenty of scope for the games to be sufficiently different.
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This!
I am generally against stupid software IP laws, but really, Tetris was a unique and simple game. Cloning it is blatantly dishonest and taking an extreme shortcut at the expense of the creator and to me really is unacceptable. Just write a new game with new ideas! We would all benefit from that more anyway. I'm ok with cloning certain elements, but not with cloning the core freaking game!
It's like taking a symphony that you did not write, re-transcribing it on different paper and getting a different
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I would say that it's too simple to qualify for copyright protection in the first place.
Just by *watching* tetris being played I can write a tetris clone in a single hour of programming, it's not that hard. And I can do it without looking at source code.
It's trivially easy to reverse engineer even if you don't have source code to look at.
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Who cares how long it takes to write the code? That is a completely meaningless metric. 'The code' is not what is in question here, 'the game' is. So, answer the proper question 'can you create a new, original game that millions of people around the world will want to play'. If you say 'yes', why haven't you done it?
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In orchestral non-vocal music, the melody is the only protectable part of the composition. So at that point, your analogy fails.
But, just to give everyone a bad analogy to abuse me for: giving protectability to the shapes and grid size is akin to giving protection to an arrangement's choice of the key of F, because that made it easier for the clarinets to perform.
Based on the linked summary of ruling, it seems the judge was convinced that the grid size constituted expression. However, as explored by Judge
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... not all choices are expressive, merely consequential to the idea, and...
This would have been better said as "... not all choices are expressive, some are consequential to the idea, and.."
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... not all choices are expressive, merely consequential to the idea, and...
This would have been better said as "... not all choices are expressive, some are consequential to the idea, and.."
I love these, the Idiot Pedant. lolol
All you did is remove information, remove the lessening word, and repeat the rest of the claims. So you changed the proportional meaning of the different parts. How is that "better said?" In order for such a change in meaning to be "better said," you would have to have a full understanding of the precise intent of the author. That is impossible from such a small passage.
Does it make you feel better about living in your mom's basement to show yourself having poor reading
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Just write a new game with new ideas!
Yeah! Instead of suing people who make clones of your old game, do something productive and make a new game.
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Re:Not a good precedent (Score:4, Funny)
[quote] You see, Tetris is a very simple game, there's no hidden levels of depth to it. It's blocks falling and you arrange them to make lines that disappear.[/quote]
Sir, I pray for your soul that no serious Tetris fanatics get a hold of this comment. You do not fathom the degrees and tournament rules they have developed over what is or isn't allowed. Dare I even mention the black market, and underground games? The unlicensed, hard core stacking where two people enter, one person leaves?
I would recommend that you start packing your bags now and moving to a third world country. I fear they may already be planning for you to wake up with the head of a T block in your bed tomorrow.
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There does not need to be more games involving blocks that fall and need to be arranged into lines so they disappear.
There does not need to be a monopoly on such games either.
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There does not need to be more games
No games need to exist in the first place.
What you have here is a game that is so similar to Tetris that it is not innovative
Tetris in itself is not innovative. It's now an old game, and such decisions do nothing to further the alleged original intentions of copyright law.
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Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. The original (and current) purpose of patent law is to give people control over their inventions for a period of time. The purpose of copyright law is to give people control of their literary and artistic works for a period of time.
The entire notion of a game being protected by copyright is dubious. This is what design patents a
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Why design patents? Surely the rules of a game are a method of operation for playing the game. Unless games aren't useful, a regular utility patent would seem to be a better choice to me. The 'tap' patent from the Magic card game is a utility patent, but that's the only game rule patent I know of.
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Some aspects of a game could probably be covered by utility patents, certainly, but anything that could even remotely be eligible for copyright protection would probably fall well outside that space.
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Ah, that's it; I had only been thinking of the functional elements.
Yes, in that case I'd agree with you that games are probably best protected by utility patents for the working bits and design patents for the ornamental elements (so as to avoid the utility doctrine in copyright and other rules that could result in a loss of protection), with a smattering of copyright for the expression of instructions, and for art that's clearly separable from useful material, and at least for the duration of the core pate
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Call of Duty, though, can have different stories to tell in the campaign, can have different mechanics for weapons, different maps, multiplayer options, squad sizes. There's plenty of scope for the games to be sufficiently different.
Call of Duty VII: Kill the Lawyers
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The fellows over at harddrop.com [harddrop.com] that prefer the licensed Tetris Grand Master series and the 'ripoff' Lockjaw game would like a word with you.
Lockjaw appears to have already been taken down. Is the Tetris clone in Emacs next?
The Real Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
The real crime here is that Tetris is still protected under copyright.
Re:The Real Crime (Score:5, Funny)
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Still?
That simple concept doesn't deserve copyright protection period. I could write a tetris clone in my sleep after watching someone else play it for just 20 seconds.
This decision basically says that functionality can itself be creative.
I say bullshit, that's what we have patents for.
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The real question is not 'could you write such a game after seeing someone play it', but 'could you write such a game having never seen it or had it described to you'. Answering 'yes' to the second question shows creativity, something worthy of protection. Answering 'yes' to only to first question shows some trivial programming skills and no creativity, and is worthy of nothing.
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No, he could have the rules described to him. Copyright doesn't protect the game rules, just the creative elements that are not necessary for the game.
Look at how third party manufacturers developed a BIOS that was compatible with the IBM BIOS to facilitate the development of generic IBM PC-compatible computers. One team looked through the BIOS and developed a spec, and the second team implemented the spec without looking at the BIOS. Since nothing protectable was actually copied, copyright infringement was
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That simple concept doesn't deserve copyright protection period. I could write a tetris clone in my sleep after watching someone else play it for just 20 seconds.
It's easy to copy. It's a lot harder to come up with something so good yourself.
Re:The Real Crime (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of them perhaps. I think copyright should be determined experimentally in that it is progressively shortened until such point where you clearly see a fall in new works, then left at a point where they're short enough to hurt creators noticeably, but long enough that the effect is "noticeable" not "catastrophic".
For videogames, I think that'd mean 10 years. Certainly not 30. If all 10-year-old video-games where freely available, I think this would harm the new-game market noticeably, but not catastrophiccally. (notice how that's already close to true: 10 year old video-games, even AAA titles, can be had for a dollar a piece or something like that)
Copyright aren't supposed to stop people from independently creating their own similar works though: just because painter A made a portrait of a woman looking to the left while sitting in front of an oak-tree with a red apple in her hand, it doesn't stop painter B from doing the same thing.
The shape of the pieces in tetris aren't creatively distinct, instead they are mathemathically determined: they're the full set of all possible 4-squares connected pieces.
It's like claiming 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 is a creative selection of 3-digit binary numbers, when infact it's just an exhaustive list of *all* 3-digit binary numbers.
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Interesting idea, but the problem is that it's hard to tell whether a certain length of copyright hurts the market because it decreases the financial incentive, or because it makes old works available thus saturating the market. In the first case, lengthening the duration of copyright would encourage the creation of more works. But in the second case it wouldn't be a good move, as works that could only compete if access to old works was restricted aren't a worthwile addition to our culture and shouldn't be
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Saturating the market with older, free, works thus outcompeting the new works is the only effect of notice. We already know that essentially all works are commercially worthless after a decade, indeed most works are commercially worthless after 5 years.
There are some works that still pull in money after more than a decade - Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Beatles, but those are rare exceptions, and usually wildly profitable in the first 10 years too.
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If all 10-year-old video-games where freely available,
All 10 year old video games are freely available.
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10 years probably suffices for industry to turn a profit, but when you're fighting powerful companies and ideologues who want perpetual copyright, who fear competition from 50-year-old works, who would claim it's an injustice that every single person that reads Mark Twain should pay their great-great-grandkids...
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Copyright is already commercial. There are many forms of taxation but I'm amazed that anyone would seriously promote an exponential one. Do you really think the government needs that money? The artist already pays income tax. Why should your rights to creative works depend on how much money you have in the bank? Not to mention that as a tax, this one is extremely regressive, favoring the large studios which produce few works.
This idea is profound -- it is bottomlessly stupid.
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Creative works have a long tail distribution, both on the individual level and the macro scale. This proposal axes that tail, and hand it to the tax-collecting entity. You also have failed to comprehend the meaning of the following words: regressive, tax.
"Success" should not affect one's rights. The rest of my points stand.
P.S. Nice strawman with "natural" rights.
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This would harm free software though, except for free software which is in the public domain.
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I don't think that's a good enough reason. I'd rather have generally good copyright laws even if it harmed the enforceability of software freeing licenses, rather than the craptastrophe we've got now, even if it means that no one can make a closed source fork of EMACS for the rest of my life. Look at the big picture, man.
(Plus, why not alter copyright further? For example that in order to get a copyright on software, the author would have to deposit a complete copy of the code written to produce the binary
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Reasonable, but I'd make it instead free for a decade, then start at $1000 and double every year. That way everyone gets protection and can -after- the fact purchase longer terms if a work is successful.
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It clearly depends on the kind of work. For example, I think it's clear that for books, and music, competition from 10 year old books would harm sales of new works substantially.
For video-games, this is less clear. Final Fantasy X, for PS2 is a decade old, would people really flock to that rather than the current offerings if the price was zero ?
Notice how the price is *already* a tiny fraction of the price of new games, and that hasn't caused people to flock to it. If people aren't choosing FF-X at $5 over
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The real crime here is that Tetris is still protected under copyright.
Tetris isn't that old, you know.
Release 1984, I believe. Less than 30 years ago. Even those arguing for shorter copyright terms would probably be okay with that still being protected.
No, they wouldn't. See e.g. Dr. Rufus Pollock's research [rufuspollock.org] or the position paper of the European Greens/European Freedom Alliance [greens-efa.eu] faction in the EU parliament.
1984 + 20 = 2004, so the game would be Public Domain (as in expiration of the "commercial copyright") on January 1st, 2005.
So, how long ago was 1984? Let's see... TEN YEARS before Windows '95? Indeed, there WAS no Microsoft Windows in 1984: Windows 1.0 was from November 1985. No bell ringing? OK, how about the year of the famous 1984 Super Bowl commerc
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Darn, forgot the UNIX crowd;
"In 1984, four Berkeley students—Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou—wrote the first Unix implementation, called The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) Server."
Yes, UNIX people wanting to standardize were actually still busy with HOSTS.TXT from SRI-NIC.ARPA (see RFC 952).
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Huh? US Copyright is 125 years. It started at 50 years, but companies lengthened it dramatically.
I don't know how copyright comes into play here. They would have need to make an exact copy of the blocks. If they remade it themselves, it wouldn't be a copyright violation. Much like if I tried to paint a Jackson Pollock. Am I missing something?
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Except that most of those are not remakes, they are new scripts using existing characters. As far as these works are concerned, about the only thing protected by copyright that they have re-used are the titles and names of the characters.
It is really funny that you included Snow White as an example of things still under copyright meaning nothing new has to be created. The Snow White you are referring to is NOT a Disney movie (it is Universal). It does NOT use any elements of the still-under-copyright Di
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Dallas is a bad example -- it's not a remake, they've picked up the storyline 20 years later.
(It's not bad, BTW, but that's a bit OT)
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How is that a crime?
Some people seem to think it's absolutely ridiculous.
Honestly, what is the proper change that should be made?
Shorten copyright.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's absurd. The shape of the blocks comes from the fact that those are all the possible 2D geometric arrangements of 4 connected blocks on a grid. If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.
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I really dislike that part of the ruling as well.
I also strongly suspect that, magically, this ruling will do nothing to help those poor developers who have been utterly ripped off by Zynga, in several well-known cases like this one. [macgasm.net] Call me cynical, if you will.
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i played both, there were similarities but Dream Heights had much better art and game mechanics were different
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.
It's The Tetris Company. Don't give them ideas.
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Then you should look at Hextris [hextris.com].
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Ask Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney... (Score:2)
Given that Mickey Mouse is still successfully covered by copyright/patent etc. I think the lawyers for Tetris will argue that they are just following precedence and would like at least another 50 years protection.....
District court judge confuses copyright and patent (Score:1)
A patent protects the functionality of a product. The way the blocks are manipulated in the game is functional.
Until this is heard on appeal ... there will be a multitude of authors of famous games who will be threatening the copycats under this stupid decision.
(Oh, and copyrights are worldwide ... this judge has effectively granted the author a game a world-wide patent upon it. Let the games begin!)
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(Oh, and copyrights are worldwide ... this judge has effectively granted the author a game a world-wide patent upon it. Let the games begin!)
No they're not. Copyrights are national, there's just a system of reciprocity in granting them nationally. Remember the thing with Amazon and 1984? That happened because the book was in the public domain in Australia, and copyrighted in the US, due to national differences in copyright law.
And anyway, copyrights are not patent substitutes. Although this opinion certainly tries to make for one; it's pretty badly done.
Dr Mario, Bejewleled Etc (Score:2)
Are all similar but do not violate the copyright. So there is some hope for similar, non-infringing games.
Is it Tetris if the 'R' isn't backward? (Score:2)
You don't need to break down and analyze which individual details make a Tetris clone a Tetris clone that violates copyright versus a Tetris clone which doesn't; it's quite clear at first glance that Mino is just simply Tetris. I know this sort of thing is a popular debate, and this is hardly the first example of its kind, but the extremely wide range of Tetris clones that survive without legal problems do so because their developers make at least the bare minimum effort to change something fundamental. Not
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it's quite clear at first glance that Mino is just simply Tetris.
It is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The party in the wrong here is the one who claims copyright over the set of polygons that can be constructed out of 4 congruent squares. Them, and the court that agreed with them.
What's next, a copyright claim on the 5 platonic solids?
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Tetris is more than just a "set of polygons that can be constructed out of 4 congruent squares,"
It's a falling block game, where the blocks are composed of 4 squares. If I make a falling block game where the blocks are composed of 5 squares, or of 4 triangles, I'd be OK under copyright law.
But if I use blocks made out of 4 squares, suddenly I'm in violation of copyright law? How does that not amount to a copyright claim over simple geometric shapes?
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If Tetris was such a simple concept that it shouldn't deserve copyright protection, then why would official Tetris be so much more popular than profitable than not-quite-Tetris?
Branding.
Anyone can make playing cards, but some brands of playing cards (e.g. Bicycle) remain popular. There are probably people who swear by dice (an ancient gaming invention) made by one manufacturer over another even when there's no discernible difference. Going a little further afield, anyone can make blue jeans, but people keep Levi's in business.
Of course, then there's a whole 'nother argument as to whether or not there is a protectable TETRIS trademark. (I would say that there is not, per the Shredd
Tetrinet (Score:2)
How would this affect Tetrinet?
...seriously? (Score:2)
Hey Milton Bradley, here's your new cash cow! (Score:2)
Alright M-B,
Sue Zynga over "Words with Friends" again, but this time instead of claiming that they're copying your game, just claim copyright on the letters 'A', 'B', 'C', etc. Want to make a clone? Use Chinese characters or the Greek alphabet or something. No English letters for you!
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Does Words with Friends use exactly the same game board positions for double,triple letter/word scores as Scrabble? Do they use exactly the same dimensions for their game board? Just curious - I never played. Those are the kind of things we're talking about. Your argument is purely reductio ad absurdum.
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Yes and No. Words with Friends uses the same board dimensions, the same number of letters, the same scoring. The placement of the bonus blocks is a little different, but the properties of the bonus blocks are identical.
I think with this precedent, Hasbro could easily go after the multi-million dollar knock-off like Words with Friends. They have a case. The same thing with Taito and their wildly popular game Bust-A-Move which has had a large number of clones ever since it came out. Taito never went after
visual objects vs. mathematical objects (Score:2)
The VISUAL shape of the objects and dimensions of the grid may be copyrightable, but the MATHEMATICAL ones should not be. If there is only one reasonable visual shape that matches the mathematical shape, then it, too, should not be copyrightable.
Remember Rubik's Cube? There were knock-off puzzles of various shapes including spheres, cubes with the corners cut off, various different color schemes, etc. But they were all mathematically identical to the Rubik's Cube.
A Tetris-like game with squiggly-snake-sh
Right result, wrong reasons (Score:3)
While I'd agree with the court that the clone (Mino) infringes on the Tetris copyright, the analysis that the court used to get there suffers from some defects in its application. Some of this may be due to the parties in the suit, for not raising certain arguments or making them well, but that's really not much of an excuse.
The court is correct that the Tetris program is not protected in its entirety by copyright, and that one of the key issues in the case is to sort out what is and isn't protected. Basically, copyright protects certain expressions of an idea, but not the underlying idea itself. It does not protect procedures, processes, systems, or methods of operation. This includes the rules of a game, which constitute the procedure for playing it. Thus any part of Tetris that is present because the rules of the game -- however arbitrary those rules might be -- require it, isn't a matter of creative expression, but a necessary incident of implementing tetris. (Creativity in copyright law, you see, is all about making choices)
Where the court errs is in determining the rules:
Tetris is a puzzle game where a user manipulates pieces composed of square blocks, each made into a different geometric shape, that fall from the top of the game board to the bottom where the pieces accumulate. The user is given a new piece after the current one reaches the bottom of the available game space. While a piece is falling, the user rotates it in order to fit it in with the accumulated pieces. The object of the puzzle is to fill all spaces along a horizontal line. If that is accomplished, the line is erased, points are earned, and more of the game board is available for play. But if the pieces accumulate and reach the top of the screen, then the game is over. These then are the general, abstract ideas underlying Tetris and cannot be protected by copyright nor can expressive elements that are inseparable from them.
As a long-time tetris player, I think that the court left a few rules out. First, tetris blocks are tetrominos -- shapes that can be formed from an assemblage of four squares each of which abuts at least one other square, both along their edges. Tetris uses all seven possible tetrominos. This is a functional aspect of the game, just like an American football has a particular size, shape, and other qualities. If football were played with, say, a baseball, it would greatly change the game. So too with Tetris and its blocks.
Second, the size and shape of the playing field is functional. An analogy: While a baseball field's dimensions can vary due to local conditions (e.g. Fenway Park's left field is short because of an adjacent street), it should be about 300 to 400 feet. Imagine how different the game would be if you tried to play baseball at Mick Shrimpton Memorial Field, where due to a mistake in the blueprints the field is only 300 inches long. Could you play a decent game in a field where home runs only need to go 25 feet? You'd better have a hell of a pitcher. Who incidentally, is comfortable standing 5 feet in front of the batter. Fields that fall within a particular range are a part of the game of tetris.
It's true that a small variation in the dimensions of the tetris playing field might not matter much, at least not to casual players. (Experts are probably highly sensitive to this.) So perhaps an argument could be made that since it needn't be a particular size and shape, and thus they are creative, copyrightable material. However, there are probably only a few small variations possible before the effect does become noticeable and affects play. In copyright, when you have a feature of a work that is creative but there are only a few possible choices that express the same uncopyrightable idea (e.g. "It was a dark and stormy night" could be "It was a pitch-black and tempestuous night" but even with a good thesaurus, there's not a hell of a lot of ways of saying the same thing), the expression is deemed to have merged with the idea. This prevents people f
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You also for got this one:
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For shame! it's not pentis!
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Or similarly, get all the groupings of 5 that can be generated?
Personally, I liked a variation of Tetris called SuperTetris.
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The triominoes will be boring, the pentominoes will be very, very hard.
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The triominoes will be boring, the pentominoes will be very, very hard.
And how: http://www.cathelius.co.uk/flash/pentrix [cathelius.co.uk] I gather the author had to add the 'settling' mechanic because otherwise it was as friendly as one of those statistically-worst piece Tetris games.
Here's a thought.... What if you made a game where you could choose an upper and lower bound on the piece size? Set it to 4 and 4 and you have Tetris, but set it to, say 3 and 5 and you'd have a mix of tri-, tetr-, and pentominoes. Is it still infringing if the config options can be tweaked to mimic Tetris?