Slashdot Mirror
Takedown Letters For WP7 Tetris Clones
karios writes "Today I received a takedown letter from a law firm representing the Tetris Company for copyright violations involving my game Tetrada, which I published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The witch hunt, after hitting Android, iOS and other platforms, continues on Windows Phone 7. It's a pity, since some of the tetromino games in the Marketplace were pretty decent."
...willful infrigement.
You copied the game and even made the name of the game sound similar to the original, and you call it a 'witch hunt' -- man, you need a reality check.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
I am a small consultant, finding work is more and more difficult. ... :-)
Big companies do not consider me since I am too small, small companies have not much cash left for ICT and when they spend they wish to have "guarantees" that I cannot give...
Yes, someone made some money on ipad or android market, what is the probability that you are one of the lucky ones ?
Add the fact that every year half of the knowledge you had is just become useless and
The constant threat to be offsourced to china or india and...
The increasing litigation for the most obvious ideas...
I am amazed that anybody take up a job in computing
You deliberately chose "Tetrada" to sound similar to "Tetris" and on alone the basis that the software is a video game (no matter what else it does), that's grounds for a take down letter, and a civil court case if you don't comply. You are deluded if you think you can play the victim here, and adding your tragic story to the Wikipedia article on the Tetris Company doesn't make your case stronger.
Is it really so difficult to be original?
Honestly, it really annoys me to see your mediocrity dressed up in self-justification and misplaced outrage. You are not a victim, you are an idiot.
My blog
Imagine if you actually came up with an ORIGINAL game, the Tetris Company blatantly "cloned" it, and released it in the same marketplace... would that be fair?
Clearly a newbie. The game industry is littered with people being sued for selling clones right back to pacman and earlier. Didn't you do any research before doing this? Not exactly a great advert for your thoroughness and professionalism and now you've announced it to the world to prove the point.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
This game is so dirty, it makes sex look like church!
If you didn't use one shred of their code and if you put something in the game that was different, I do think you would have a case against them. That sounds similar to if Coca Cola sued Simply Cola. I don't think they have, but I am sure that the case would be thrown out. I think if you stole their content or were hosting their game without permission and charging for it, then you would be at fault.
Seeing the flurry of comments mocking the submitter of his copying Tetris makes me realize how successful the corporations have been in their propaganda.
Copyright has evolved from a concept conceived to protect the temporary financial incentive of inventors as encouragement of advancing humanities to a god-give right for corporations to hold indefinitely the exclusive right to monetary gains regarding anything they find a way to copyright or patent. Musicians pride themselves in their own rendition of Fantaisie-Impromptu, but programmers cannot be allowed to remake a game that has been known and enjoyed world-wide for decades. Is there anyone on Slashdot that doesn't know the basic formula to a Tetris game? Once something has become as common place as Tetris is, you have to step back and realize that it has become the possession of man-kind. Using copyright as a tool to limit people's freedom to reinvent or recreate a knowledge known to all is exactly the opposite of what copyright laws should have been made to protect.
Word Perfect 7? WordPress 7? Oh. Windows Phone 7. I'll file that one under irrelevant.
That was something recent they stated last year I believe.
I don't think it applied to game play, just the actual rules.
Also, I keep thinking it was with regards to Hasbro, even though that wouldn't narrow it up much.
Sorry, but it's 2:30 am here, I'm very tired, and too lazy to try and do the searches to find the citations the A.C. wanted, what's his excuse...
http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
read the true story of tetris.
Alexey Pajitnov is the infringer here. he grabbed what three people have created together for himself, without giving them credit, leave aside their proper shares.
average street pimp has more ethics. it doesnt strike me odd that, the legal system is exploited most by aggressive exploiters to attack others, even though they should be the ones in defense.
Read radical news here
Then this clown should have released his code for free because he based it on something that apparantly belongs to the public. But oh no, he filled it with DRM and put it up for a sale on a DRM riddled platform.
Don't claim information wants to be free if you are trying to sell your rip-off.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Didn't we have this story a few months ago?
Regardless of anyone's feelings on this, it doesn't become more newsworthy the more clones you report on.
I think that the OP is fishing for advice and/or sympathy - sounds like it should have been posted in Ask Slashdot after all...
Ceci n'est pas une
Slashdot in general is fairly sympathetic towards individual copyright infringement for personal use. However that does not mean any significant portion of readers is sympathetic to wilful copyright infringement for commercial purposes, especially if you are dumb enough to drag trademark infringement into it as well.
Releasing an open source clone of an old game will get a completely different response then making a commercial clone of an old game.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
This has been going on for over a decade now.. see http://abednarz.net/wp/1999/07/30/ and the corresponding Slashdot article from 1999 http://games.slashdot.org/story/99/02/19/0827245/Tetris-Under-Fire about my game Bedter (which is still online 12 years after the cease and desist letters were ignored http://abednarz.net/wp/category/software/windows-software/bedter/)
Microsoft are doing phone software now? Well I never. Next you'll be saying they've got a search engine.
Ok, I've read every single one of the comments (so far). The issue here is not me not being original. I know I wasn't. The issue is if I (and many more) are breaking the law. Did Pro Evolution Soccer break the law when they made a game oh-so-similar to the Fifa series? They were careful enough not to include players and teams names that had a copyright, but the gameplay followed the rules of football (or soccer for my US friends), which have not copyright and could not have any. And the shape of the ball was the same in both games. And Kick Off 2 .And Sensible Soccer. Oh my god, the non-original senseless clowns.
If my game was better or worse, or if it brings anything new to the "original" is for the customers and the market to decide. Some reviewers said that it was in fact better because it played better and it felt better to them. But all that is irrelevant. If you ask me, it was a better implementation in this version, and I was preparing some never-before-seen game modes for the next version. Will anyone get to see the innovation apart from me? No. Would I be breaking the law when I would bring original gameplay modes in the mix? I would still be using tetrominos, but for anyone over 12 it is known that tetrominos (like dominos, trominos, pentominos, hexominos etc) were NOT invented by Tetris, were not used there for the first time and while Tetris is copyrighted as a word, other words that derive from the word tetromino are not all copyrighted by this fact.
Quoting wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyomino):
"Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the enumeration of pentominoes is dated to antiquity. Many results with the pieces of 1 to 6 squares were first published in Fairy Chess Review between the years 1937 to 1957, under the name of “dissection problems.” The name polyomino was invented by Solomon W. Golomb in 1953 and it was popularized by Martin Gardner."
"The word polyomino and the names of the various orders of polyomino are all back-formations from the word domino, a common game piece consisting of two squares, with the first letter d- fancifully interpreted as a version of the prefix di- meaning “two”. The name domino for the game piece is believed to come from the spotted masquerade garment domino, from Latin dominus. Most of the numerical prefixes are Greek. Polyominoes of order 9 and 11 more often take the Latin prefixes nona- (nonomino) and undeca- (undecomino) than the Greek prefixes ennea- (enneomino) and hendeca- (hendecomino)."
So clearly, the names were used long before Tetris. I can agree that Tetris is a make-believe word that uniquely characterizes this game. That is why I did not use this word, and chose to use a greek dictionary word, Tetrada.
My other game, MonsterUp, was inspired by Doodle Jump on the iOS. If you saw v1.0, it was somewhat similar as well. By v.1.3 (I am releasing 1.4 these days) it has transformed to something unique and innovative. All games are inspired by some other game, save for a selected few. Are all these games illegal and immoral? Improving on current designs IS a way of innovation. Angry Birds did it successfully (improving on Crush the Castle) and everyone cheered! Worms "ripped off" Scorched Earth. Every FPS out there "stole" from Wolfenstein 3D and the list goes on.
Wake up, the Tetris Company is using their money to pay lawyers to maintain a monopoly on tetromino puzzle games. That is the end of it. And you people cheer for them.
why would you think they would not come after you on wp7?
did you forget to take your meds?
Alexey Pajitnov conceived El-Fish, Clockwerx, and other puzzle games.
Mr. Pajitnov didn't come up with Clockwerx. There was a period of time when he would put his endorsement on half of what Spectrum Holobyte published, which lasted roughly until 1996 when he and Mr. Rogers formed The Tetris Company. But that doesn't mean he was involved in the design of any of these products any more than he was involved with Panel de Pon.
However, you have a game that looks like Tetris *AND* a game name similar to Tetris.
Would it be safe if the name of a Tetris clone didn't share any letters with Tetris, like Lockjaw? You might think so, but The Tetris Company and one of its licensees (Arika Ltd.) went on several rampages of OCILLA takedown notices on YouTube. They even sent a takedown notice for a video criticizing Arika's behavior, which YouTube for some reason kept down for longer than the OCILLA maximum 14 business days after counter-notification.
Everything I've read indicates these cases have no basis in law to support them. They're going after the little guys that can't afford a lawsuit.
I hope someone chokes up the money to fight these guys.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Why has something like Quadrapassel (tetris on Gnome/Ubuntu?) survived?
non commercial, opensource too probably
Tetris hasn't lost its trademark until Tetris has failed to defend it in court. Has Tetris lost a court case yet?
The original idea of copyright was, if I am not mistaken (and of course IANAL), was extended to physical objects after the infringement against Elijah McCoy. I know there is debate about this, and that's fine since the story provides a suitable analogy and that is all I'm going for. Also, please excuse my interchangeable use of patent/copyright. While I understand that copyright is generally for media and patent is for physical inventions, I am also under the distinct impression that either can be applied to any original invention, physical or media, given the proper conditions. Once again, IANAL so forgive my inevitable ignorance of the finer points to be considered along those lines.
The phrase "The real McCoy" is believed by many to have originated with his device for lubricating the wheel/break/drive-shafts of locomotive machine parts. The device was hugely popular but, like any good inventor, Elijah wanted to make it rich, so he charged a rather hefty price for his contraption. Very quickly, his fledgling company noticed similar devices attached to locomotives operating across the country. Many of them were substandard and some were even being returned to his company with complaints and demands for repair. The resulting legal battles are reported to have significantly strengthened copyright/patent law.
Disregarding the inevitable deluge of corrections I am bound to get for my summarized narrative of Elijah McCoy and his invention, my point here is that he created a MECHANICAL device that performed a function as-yet unrealized by any other manufacturer. His idea was good, and should have resulted in wealth for him but he had to depend on copyright to protect his invention. The copies were original works, crafted with iron or steel purchased from the market. They doubtless only looked at his design before making their duplicates.
They were only stealing his idea. That's the WHOLE POINT of copyright and patent... Protecting the RIGHT TO COPY.
I do not support the OP. You were trying to make money off someone else's idea. Invent a derivative work and I would support you all the way, but you're just a cheap hack attempting to siphon money away from someone else.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Compare Atari v. Philips, the KC Munchkin case, to Capcom v. Data East, the Fighter's History case. Atari, the exclusive licensee of Pac-Man, won because KC Munchkin copied more of the original appearance than is necessary to represent the uncopyrightable game rules. Capcom, on the other hand, lost because any similarities between Street Fighter and Fighter's History are scenes a faire, that is, they are expected in the genre and follow from the similarities in uncopyrightable aspects.
Imagine if you actually came up with an ORIGINAL game, the Tetris Company blatantly "cloned" it, and released it in the same marketplace
In fact, Tetris is already cloning other people's games: see Feevo, which is essentially Bejeweled with Puyo Pop's line clear rules.
would that be fair?
As long as only the game rules and not the graphics were copied, yes. Do you think Atari should have owned the exclusive right to first-person shooters after having developed and published Battlezone? Or should Namco and Midway have owned the exclusive rights to scrolling platformers after having developed and published Pac-Land, to exclude Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. from the market? And should AT&T and Novell have been able to shut down Linux and FreeBSD, which are clones of UNIX?
Tetris is still relatively recent (less than 30 years old)
And in a decade, you'll be saying it's "still relatively recent (less than 40 years old)". The rules of a game are properly the subject of patent law, not copyright law, and patents last 20 years. Oh, Mr. Pajitnov didn't apply for a patent? Tough poop.
A government form letter states: "Copyright does not protect the idea for a game [...] or the method or methods for playing it." See 17 USC 102(b). Then see a lawyer and then consider filing a counter-notice.
But oh no, he filled it with DRM and put it up for a sale on a DRM riddled platform.
What major handheld video gaming platform isn't DRM riddled? Nintendo and Sony handhelds enforce a digital imprimatur, as do iPhone, iPod touch, Windows Phone 7, and "feature phones" that run the BREW environment. It's impossible to distribute code for these platforms that isn't DRM riddled. Even Android isn't immune, with AT&T hiding the checkbox to install apk files from "Unknown sources".
Don't claim information wants to be free if you are trying to sell your rip-off.
Yet Red Hat and Canonical sell Linux, a rip-off of Novell's UNIX.
This is just some schmuck whining. He isn't asking for advice. It isn't even news. It is just a pity party for the submitter.
The Tetris company does not "own dropping blocks". They own "stacking dropping blocks, consisting of distinct shapes made of sets of four boxes connected at the edges, into rows which disappear when a row is completed across the game field". This equivalent to id software owning "running around a maze of rooms and corridors set on Phobos while shooting alien demons of specific shapes and abilities using a gun called the BFG9000".
You are over-simplifying the situation to leave out important distinguishing characteristics.
Apple tried to sue Microsoft in the 90's for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh. Microsoft fought hard an won on the grounds that Copyright only covers the actual CODE and not the look and feel of a program. This is one thing we really can thank Microsoft for - legal precedent in the field of software on this major issue. It should be obvious to people, but apparently it's not. He didn't COPY the tetris program - just made his own that works similarly.
Go and rename your game "asdhlsjdfdf" and resubmit it, I guarantee you that you won't get another takedown letter.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Forget Tetris, when is somebody gonna either release, or clone Lemmings?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
From wikipedia on the famous "Lotus vs Borland" case on a software product being "too similar" to another: The Lotus decision establishes a distinction in copyright law between the interface of a software product and its implementation. The implementation is subject to copyright. The public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (for example, the appearance of an icon). However, the set of available operations and the mechanics of how they are activated are not copyrightable. This standard allows software developers to create original clones of copyrighted software products without infringing the copyright.
They can trademark "Tetris and anything confusingly similar to it".
Because it's not called Tetrapassel.
He couldn't have violated Tetris' copyrights unless he copied their source code or other files into his project. Copyright simply doesn't cover imitation.
News flash - companies create products that are imitations of previous successful products. Same thing happens in music, movies, books, and every other market you can think of.
Selling an imitation is only illegal if it violates a copyright, patent, trademark, NDA, and maybe some other arcane legal restrictions. But the fact that it is a clone does not make it illegal.
Apple derives its name from the word apple, the ancient English word for apple.
Which has nothing to do with software (and neither had to do with music, back then, see the other Apple company). It's an original word in this usage.
I urge you to name your software company "Software Company" and manage to get it accepted as a trademark.
Tetris is a game played with tetrominos. Any game name which describes the gameplay (as opposed to having an abstract name like "Zorglub") is going to have a bit of that word in it's name.
It's like if a company created a game with dominoes and trademarked the title "Dominostorm", and subsequently sued another company for attempting to market a domino game called "Avalanche of Dominoes" on the ground that both contain the word "domino". Yes, of course they will : both are about dominoes.
That would be the equivalent of Microsoft soft trademarking "Windows" alone (instead of "Microsoft Windows") and than suing anyone who use the word "window" to describe a GUI's window.
Or it would be like if all pizzerias and pizza-related restaurants started suing each other on the ground that the word "Pizza" occurs in most of their name.
The number 4 shouldn't be trademarkable in the name of something which has to do with four.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I had written a Tetris-like game a while back for Windows Mobile. It got quite popular, too, and kind of an ego boost to be sure. However, I also received the same cease and desist about 5 years ago. Though I did not actually pull my game, I stopped developing it. I just don't want to waste a penny on legal resources for an implementation of a game idea that wasn't mine to begin with. There are better, more important things to code, and better ideas to explore. It's a waste of time to get hung up on trying to clone someone else's software.
They don't care about the content as they do the name. If its even slightly similar you're going to get a hassle. If the content is good, it will sell.
Depending on where one looks, legal concerns over the Tetris game are not necessarily new. In 1989, the notable game Tetris: The Soviet Mind Game, which was produced by Tengen, was removed from the market after a legal ruling against Tengen. (It would be interesting to know as to whether the actual issue was one of copyright or trademark.) In addition, it has been said that there was a now-obscure Tetris game that was released for the Sega Megadrive console.
Over the years, there have been multiple instances where games have resembled existing games. For instance, on the Apple Macintosh platform, there was the shareware Bakudanjin game which has been regarded as a clone of the Bomberman video game. (According to the iDevGames "Bakudanjin Postmortem" article, producing a game that constituted a clone was one of the aspects that didn't work so well with the Bakudanjin project, even though the Bakudanjin game was successfully released.) In addition, there was the freeware Arashi game which is said to be similar to the Tempest video game.