Slashdot Mirror

You'll have to ask Blue Planet Software about that. When Nintendo first introduced Virtual Console on the original Wii, it mentioned GoldenEye and Tetris as games that would be unlikely to show up because of licensing difficulties.

Yes, essentially. The procedure for content at another Google division is explained here. A similar procedure should apply.

In this case, the complaint seems to be primarily a trademark complaint which is probably easily addressed (you can say "Compare to Tetris(R)!" in a game description but you can't call your game "FreeTetris"). And a secondary, very vague claim that because the games are "similar" to the company's game that they use copyrighted material of the company. I don't know whether case law supports that or not, but according to what I've read in a quick Googling it probably doesn't.

According to Wikipedia, this is standard operating procedure for The Tetris Company and they've done the same with Apple's App Store. Not clear that The Tetris Company has ever won a lawsuit on these copyright grounds, but use it to beat small developers up.

Additionally, they pressured a company Biosocia last year via lawsuit to take down their Blockles game. See the statement on the outcome of that (it was settled, not litigated to conclusion - sounds like Biosocia got tired of spending money to fight the lawsuit and just agreed to take the damned game down while stating that they thought that Tetris Company was full of shit).

That... is... SPARTA!!!

Or...

That's a space station!

Or...

THIS is Tetris.

From the blurb: "This means that a freeware Tetris installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers."

Point of terminology: Except for one PC DOS based prototype by Vadim Gerasimov, Tetris software is not freeware. Calling Quadra, Lockjaw, Bedter, or Emlith "Tetris" is just as incorrect as calling RC Cola or Coca-Cola "Pepsi" or calling GNU "UNIX", because it's not.

</anal-retentive>

Corrected: "This means that a freeware Soviet Mind Game installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers."

Vote Alexai Pazhitnov
Tetris owns you!

If you run a server on your gaming rig, and the server goes down because your game crashes, don't be surprised.

Why should a little game of tetris take down a server, even on Windows?

When you are using a computer for gaming, it's supposed to be the only thing you're doing on your machine, for a variety of reasons.

Then why did Microsoft ever add the ability for DirectDraw to run in a window?

3D games crash computers. They do it on ALL platforms with no exceptions.

Even GameCube?

Unless they got permission from The Tetris Company LLC to use the TETRIS mark, this mod may infringe on Elorg's registered trademark on TETRIS for video game software.

• Previous discussion of The Tetris Company's activities
• Discussion showing that TTC owns only the exclusive right to the name "TETRIS" and not to falling tetraminoes

See here and here among other places

Although the game is pretty simple, it is innovative, considering the crack-like nature of the game.

Are the KDE, Gnome, and Emacs versions in good standing with the Tetris Company?

No, Linux versions of games from commercial developers will be nearly exclusively x86. Non-x86 Linux is too small a niche, niche of a niche actually, to consider.

Non-x86 Linux may be, but if you have a good SDK, and the SDK is ported to the major PDA operating systems (Palm OS and Pocket PC), you can recompile for free.

PDAs will also lack the horsepower/memory/etc for nearly all commercial games.

Commercial games != commercial first-person shooters. Not all commercial games are 3D. Tetris, in particular, continues to sell well, even though it's been cloned on a 1.2 MHz machine with 128 bytes of RAM. If 16.8 MHz and 384 KB of RAM is powerful enough for the Game Boy Advance, then games should have no problem running on PDAs. (Or by "memory" do you mean "storage"?)

Quadra is one of the best Tetris clones I have seen out there. I recall reading on a few Tetris fansites that The Tetris Company is using its legal power to force fansites away from distributing what they believe to be "illegal" versions of Tetris, citing trademark and copyright on all games involving falling blocks made of four squares joined together. So far, the Quadra development team has not had any problems with TTC, but that doesn't mean that their lawyers are watching. Besides, Quadra plays a heck of a lot better than Tetris Worlds, and is capable of supporting 8 players in multi-player mode.

At one time, Alexey Pajitnov, one of the inventors of Tetris, thought he owned the rights to all video games based on falling blocks. The consensus now seems to be that he and the company he started with Henk Rogers owns only the word "TETRIS". Better use Vadim Gerasimov (the guy who wrote the first PC version of Tetris) instead.

Why is this giving me a lameness filter? When I added this line, it stopped. The new slashcode is quite odd...

Nope, I don't think that they should have a right to sue in that case, because it's the same thing. AIM is a strong trademark, given the installed base. Does that mean AOL should have the right to sue the Aim Recording Company

No. AIM isn't that strong. Such strengths are generally reserved for trademarks such as AMERICA ONLINE®, WARNER BROS.®, NINTENDO®, POKEMON®, MICROSOFT®, DISNEY®, STAR WARS®, and other marks along those lines where use of a trademark by a company in a related field would be considered endorsement of the new business by the existing TM owner. For example, Israel's Supreme Court overturned a registration for "BAKARDI" brand jeans because it was too similar to BACARDI® brand liquor. The Republic of China, based on the island Taiwan, also has a law about famous trademarks. And here's some information about the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, which sets guidelines for protection of famous trademarks in the U.S.

But remember Tetrisgate? The Tetris Company was found not to have a copyright or patent on the game of falling tetraminoes but merely a trademark on TETRIS®; the cloners simply changed the names of their games, all of which had been clean-room from the start. Nevertheless, the findings didn't stop a quality control consulting firm based out of Edmonton, Alberta, from calling itself Tetris Management Group. Guess the TETRIS trademark isn't that strong in Canada.

Government-granted monopolies[?] are easiest to deal with when problems are solved before they escalate; that's why trademark law (unlike US copyright and patent law) requires TM owners to react in a speedy manner, that is, either license or sue would-be infringers.

Oh, and by the way, according to Lego^H^H^H^H Elgo Irrigation's web site, there was a recent name change.

I couldn't just call my Playstation 2 game Tetris

Correct. I wrote a thorough essay on the legal issues surrounding Tetris. To sum up, TETRIS is a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, but there are no U.S. Patents on the game itself, and the game's graphics are simple enough that any source code or audiovisual work copyright can be circumvented by a simple clean room cloning project such as freepuzzlearena, which produced the Tetanus engine (soon to be renamed to Lockjaw to distance it further from the TETRIS Mark).

Want a taste of LSD? Try TOD, a falling tetramino game with nine screen distortion effects. Includes static DOS binaries plus GPL sources for recompiling on Win32 or X11 systems. Only dependency is libc + Allegro + your window system's libraries.

just because there's no tetris on the game system yet

Apparently, you've never played The Next TETRIS for PlayStation and Wintendo9x.

When's the last time you've been able to use a computer with off-the-shelf games

My games are so off-the-shelf that they've never even been on a shelf. Am I correct in inferring a hierarchy analogous to that of New York theater, i.e. "shelf," "off-shelf," and "off-off-shelf"? Besides, there are still some very popular games that don't need a GeForce or a 1 GHz Athlon. For example, TETRIS® and TETANUS(TM) both run just fine on my 25 MHz 486DX. If game makers can't make their software gracefully degrade on old hardware, that's their problem.

and Windows applications, as well as Windows itself, for more than a year or two

Most popular proprietary apps require Windows 95, or Windows 95 with Winsock 2. M$ Office, on the other hand...

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

An interesting selection. My addition to the "why isn't X there" list is Alexey Pajitnov?
I've wasted more time playing tetris than anything else.

there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game

Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).

there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game

Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).

Just think, why bother booting the whole OS when you just need to get your Tetris fix

...when you can run it on a Game Boy? Seriously, just about the only platforms that have Tetris are Nintendo, Wintendo, DOS, and Macintosh. The Tetris Company has not licensed TETRIS® on UNIX® systems.

But that's not counting Tetris-compatible games that don't bear the TETRIS® trademark, such as Quadra and TOD: Tetanus On Drugs.

It would be more useful to be able to do something like playing GTK Tetris while your new distro is installing.

Not Tetris. The Tetris Company has not yet licensed the TETRIS® trademark for use on a UNIX® system or clone. This didn't stop tetriscloners from doing their job though; they simply changed the name to something like "Bricks 2000", "Bedter", "Quadra", or "Tetanus".

If you really want to impress the sheeple[?], use the TOD engine. With features from The New Tetris, Quadra, and Tetripz, plus split-screen support and cross-platform compatibility thanks to the Allegro library, it's sure to impress.

Didn't the Tetris Company try to sue clone developers such as Pin Eight Software?

Tetris is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. Slashdot once ran a story on one developer's legal problems, which have since been overcome, freeing me to create the ultimate clone and release it for Linux, DOS, and Win32 under GNU GPL: freepuzzlearena. I figured out how to add depth to Tetris without adding too much more complexity: gravity combos.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

It wasn't Tetris® because I haven't seen it on Tetris.com, the place for all licensed Tetris products (anything else using the trademark is illegal. However, it may have been a drop-in replacement like Tetanus, Quadra, Bedter, or the one that comes with some distributions of GNU Emacs (Alt+x tetris RET).

without the examples that make it clear they're talking about a Dr. Mario-style game, I see nothing really different from, say, Tetris, which would be prior art

Claim 1 of the patent covers any game where targets (i.e. viruses) are erased by being in the same row as colored pieces (i.e. capsules) that you place. And TETRIS® is listed as prior art in the Background.

they don't want any copycats, like Bulletproof software

Actually, back when BPS was Bullet-Proof Software, it developed the TETRIS® games for NES and Game Boy. Now, as Blue Planet Software aka The Tetris Company LLC, it is still developing puzzle games for N64 and has bought the exclusive trademark rights from Elorg.

My version comes with a default theme which is a parody of the Aqua theme included with Mac OS 10.

it's "unix-like", despite the FAQ's claim that this term is a trademark violation

Pepsi® One soft drink is Coke®-like. freepuzzlearena(TM) game is Tetris®-like. If it were a trademark violation, then NetBSD would already have taken down their Call It a Duck page.

No, tetris will not run because Blue Planet Software and The Tetris Company haven't ported it yet (ergo no Tetris®), but there are lots of free falling tetromino games (read: Tetris clones) floating around. I even made one, in TI-83 B*S*C (it's not really BASIC; TI calls the 89's language Keystroke) nonetheless. And then I made a C version. Have fun!

Insane aka SameGame, now that was fun. Pick it up (as Insane on 83/86 and SameGame on 89) at ticalc.org