Slashdot Mirror
Zynga Accused of Cloning Hit Indie iPhone Game Tiny Tower
FrankPoole writes "Indie iPhone game developer Nimblebit is accusing social games giant Zynga of ripping off its popular mobile title Tiny Tower. Nimblebit's Ian Marsh got word out about the similarities between Dream Heights and Tiny Tower with an image that's still making the Twitter rounds. The image is made up of screenshots showing how Dream Heights' interface and gameplay mechanics appear strikingly similar to Tiny Tower's."
Nimblebit just got a tonne of marketing over this - who cares about the ripoff? marketing 101 => success!
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower
Or as they say, 'everything is a remix'.
If you copy a big company, the big company will sue you out of existence.
If you copy a small company, the small company will complain so hard you better watch out!
This is more about moral rules than the law.
So should Linus Torvalds and the GNU project "morally" not have cloned UNIX when making GNU/Linux?
This may be a good time to use the low-tech equivalent to check the validity of the arguments. I don't know anything about the two apps in question, but ask yourself this: at what point would a variant of the board game Monopoly be different enough to ensure Parker Brothers couldn't sue you? Would be keeping the same rules, same basic board layout, and same "props" (player tokens, money, property cards, dice, and two decks of event cards) while changing the color, name, and art style of those keep you from being sues? For example, could I make the tokens space ships, the properties different star systems, the money "space credits" that use plastic coins instead of paper bills, and use public domain images of the star systems and call is "Stellar Baron" and not get sued?
Now back to the user interface. If this was the user interface of an operating system, would the original OS UI maker have a court case? What if it was a general application interface? What about making a knock-off of Farmville in the same manner... or replicating its mechanics with a new graphical interface and naming convention - would the developer of the game get sued, and would it be successful?
Finally, if there is a lawyer in the house, what court cases have set precedent in these areas? Honestly, I do not know the answer to these as law is not my field of study. However, I do know I need to know the history of how courts have ruled before I can say whether this is a legal violation or not. (My personal bias: I believe large companies have successfully sued, while small independent game developers of boardgames often have not - but this is based only on a one week investigation into the board game developer career.)
Let's see... when I was a kid in the days of Apple ][, these neighbors of ours (Stoltzfus family) came up with a graphical programming language.
They showed it to Apple, hoping that Apple would buy. Apple strongly considered it, and then returned it, saying that they weren't interested.
A year later, they came out with Apple Logo, which was immensely popular.
Logo was created in the 60s, turtles and all. It was popular on other systems as well in the early 80s, so it doesn't really seem to me that they did anything wrong here?
It's a well documented fact that while Steve Jobs was at Parc stealing the GUI for the Mac, he also stole an office chair, a box of copy paper and a red Swingline stapler.
"Actually Apple did steal a lot of their ideas for the Mac from the Xerox Parc"
If, by "steal," you mean "bought and paid for with pre-IPO stock shares," you're right.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law