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Leaked Zynga Memo Justifies Copycat Strategy
bonch writes "After taking heat over allegations of copying hit indie game Tiny Tower, Zynga founder Mark Pincus wrote an internal memo justifying the company's strategy of cloning competing titles, citing the Google search engine and Apple iPod as successful products which weren't first in their markets. Pincus infamously told employees: 'I don't want f*cking innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'"
Who wants to come up with the next great innovation, when you know damn well that the second you do, some big player with more resources is just going to swoop in and steal it?
This is the kind of thing that copyright and patent laws were SUPPOSED to protect against. But, in reality, copyrights and patents are just something the big boys use as bludgeons against the little guys (and against each other). You think a little indie developer like Nimblebit has the money to hire even a single lawyer to go up against Zynga's *team* of high-priced lawyers? Good luck with that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And look where they are at.
excuse me, this is what capitalism is. shareholders are in for making money. and if there is an easier to make money, they will always push the company to do it.
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Someone should start copying all Zynga mobile titles. They already have done the research and figured out what are the best games to copy. You copy their games, make what you think are the best improvements, and reap all the profits. Call it Dream Tower.
...directly in their field of expertise and strength.
If you willingly cut out the best (and sometimes only) advantage that an independant developer has, their freedom to be creative, then good luck with that one.
Removing copyright from the equation doesn't seem like it would help
and why it would not help. the case here is, the big boy easily copying the little guy, but not allowing little guy to copy him through lawyer power thanks to copyrights. remove copyrights, and what would lawyers do ? there. you just liberated the little guy. and 7 billion little guys' innovation > any corporation.
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In the context of copyright and games, is this legal? Do the makers of Tiny Tower have legal recourse?
If the competition isn't copyrighting and trademarking their games as companies used to in the era of "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders", then they haven't got the tools needed to defend themselves against Zynga's predatory practices.
There have been many precedent setting cases in the US and Canada where competitors who cloned and renamed games without altering the play were able to defend against their predators, and force the competition off the market.
In short, Zynga's approach is NOT legal, but it's not something the FBI is going to investigate, either. They have to be pursued by the individual companies whose products are being cloned.
If Apple can force HTC and Samsung into a corner because of "design similarities", then the game companies should be able to lynch Zynga the same way. IP theft is IP theft, regardless of the scope or scale of the theft. The question is whether any of the competitors have the deep pockets for lawyers that Zynga does -- because the case will take YEARS to run through all the appeals before a final victory for either side.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
As some wag once said, "If you aren't stealing the competition's ideas, you aren't trying hard enough!"... :rolleyes:
Zynga's field is 'scummy games for retards'. Does it really matter if innovation in that field is stifled?
Perhaps the parasite will kill it's hosts.
The problem here is not the COPYRIGHT, but the COPYCAT. And actually, that is the main reason of creating the copyright, to prevent the copycat, not to prevent the copy-use, copy-download. What Zynga is doing is stealing in its true meaning. Not fair use, not format change, but STEALING.
Second verse, same as the first...
And if the originators of the game ideas win the case, I strongly recommend that they demand jail time for Pincus seeing as he's clearly documented that this is a POLICY of the company under his leadership, so he can't pin the blame on some middle manager and fire him instead. Jail time would mean losing out on any cash settlement, but by the time there's a victory, no one will probably still want to play that particular style of game, so it won't help with FUTURE revenue for those companies.
The question is whether the competitors want to PUNISH Zynga's leadership or PILLAGE them for cash. Unfortunately I suspect most of them will settle for cash, and Zynga will therefore just treat it as a cost of doing business and continue ripping off competitor's ideas.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Of course, Google didn't just come out with a search engine that was a copy of the competition. They created the innovative PageRank algorithm, for which they were awarded a patent and were featured on the cover of Scientific American, which made their search engine much, much better than the competition (AltaVista.) Even today I am constantly surprised by how good Google is at figuring out what I'm searching for.
The iPod too wasn't just an MP3 player. Competing MP3 players at the time had crap software that made it hard to load them up with music, poor UI, and either bad form factors (Nomad) or almost no storage (flash based devices.) What really made the iPod take off was iTMS.
Remind me again how Mafia Wars was different from Mob Wars? Maybe some better graphics?
When the Tetris folks try to squash all the Tetris clones, people here think that's bad, and we're right that it's bad to squash Tetris clones. There is no copyright on concepts. But the same applies here. It shouldn't matter too much if it's a big company copying the ideas of a small developer did or a small developer cloning the ideas of a big company. It would, of course, be polite for the big company to offer some sort of thanks, though.
I looked at the side-by-side screenshots, and while the basic (uncopyrightable) gameplay ideas are very parallel and presumably copied, the graphics (which are copyrightable) are significantly different in style. And looking at coin amounts in the two screenshots, it looks like the rules weren't copied either (not that there would be anything wrong with copying rules, since there is no copyright on game rules, only on their written expression).
Early in January, I released on Amazon's Appstore a popular app aimed at the Kindle Fire to dim the too-bright screen. About two weeks later, two others appeared. I don't know if there was copying of ideas going on. But even if there was, what's the big deal? The competing apps have somewhat different interfaces, and differ a little bit in feature set, and now consumers have more choice. And inspiration in respect of additional features can go both ways, and as a result all the apps can get better.
If the competition isn't copyrighting and trademarking their games as companies used to in the era of "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders", then they haven't got the tools needed to defend themselves against Zynga's predatory practices.
Do you have any idea how many Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones there were in the early 1980s? And few, if any, of the cloners were ever sued. This is because, as others have noted, you can't copyright game rules. You can trademark the title and copyright the code and graphics, but not stop someone else from independently re-implementing more or less the same game on their own.
There have been many precedent setting cases in the US and Canada where competitors who cloned and renamed games without altering the play were able to defend against their predators, and force the competition off the market.
Can you cite any of these cases?
f Apple can force HTC and Samsung into a corner because of "design similarities", then the game companies should be able to lynch Zynga the same way.
Apple's claims were based on patents, not copyrights or trademarks.
And if the originators of the game ideas win the case, I strongly recommend that they demand jail time for Pincus seeing as he's clearly documented that this is a POLICY of the company under his leadership, so he can't pin the blame on some middle manager and fire him instead.
You don't seem to understand much about U.S. law. Torts are not crimes, and civil cases are not criminal cases. Individuals can't prosecute someone for a crime. You can only sue them civilly and get monetary damages, and/or an injunction to stop doing something. To send someone to jail, the state or federal government would have to criminally prosecute them. And there's next to no chance this will happen here, since it's not even clear that what Zynga did was a tort, let alone an actual crime. (Most trademark and patent infringements are not crimes, though some forms of copyright infringement are.)
I assumed management knew what they were doing and approved all the copying. Do we really need leaked memos to prove it?
This is like "Leaked memo from BizCo CEO: We should make money!"
Nothing surprising here. Nothing incriminating
Yes I do. And do you have any idea how many of those clones were shut down by successful lawsuits?
The fact that winning the battles in the face of rampant gameplay/idea piracy proved futile was because of the sheer VOLUME of players. I wouldn't recommend this tactic for dealing with iOS and Android game developers, because they're going to be outnumbered by them. But when the issue is one monolithic company that's abusive, like Zynga, then the tactic DOES WORK.
As to citing cases, get off your lazy ass and search for yourself. I'm not your Google.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If they're in the business to make money, then they're right. Find something that makes a little money, and duplicate it as many times as you can. There's really no reason to waste money innovating if they've already found a method to make money (for now, of course).
I don't respond to AC's.
And they have been doing it for decades.
Ah, so it's the same as Canada, then. If you file a suit, you collect damages. If you go through the RCMP/FBI, you get justice.
So the question is not whether they CAN pursue Zynga for jail time, it's a question of whether they CHOOSE to, or go for cash instead.
It's too bad there isn't a provision on either side of the border for some sort of victim's damages collected on the basis of criminal cases.
Here I thought lawsuits were the only way any one pursued criminals in the US unless the police/FBI got involved. Thanks for clearing up that it's up to the victim to decide which approach to take.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Get a job!
This was in a SF Weekly article back in 2010. http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/
You don't need to "copyright" things. You automatically own copyright, on works that are in-scope, the moment you create it. There's no registration process or anything like that.
But: copyright doesn't apply to the rules of games. It's long established in US copyright law, hence all the variations of Monopoly.
Remake Civilization, with your own artwork, title, and independently-worded rulebook and no lawyer can touch you.
Civil law is not about what's right or wrong. It's about being the last man standing. It's about having the fortitude and war chest to defend what is yours. I've actually seen a case where a small company tried to defend it's patents against a larger one. The large company fly the lawyers in the meet with them. They took one look at the offices of the small company and told them point blank "You don't have the money to win this, we're not giving you one cent. Good day."
It seems like everyone wants to object to this because Zynga's successful and commercial.
If it was Take-Two suing FreeCiv, everyone would be taking the "information wants to be free" angle.
We can't have it both ways. If you don't support Zynga on this, you've basically got to support software patents and all sorts of other bad, restrictive stuff.
It's good that ideas can be copied. We can't change our minds on that just because the copier happens to be rich and successful.
Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
But in honesty, your ranting about nothing. Corporations are treated as juristic personalities by definition.
Pincus infamously told employees: 'I don't want f*cking innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.'
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I think the open-source movement would be well served if more OSS developers took this advice. Of course, it doesn't always apply, but if you're trying to compete with a dominant commercial product, don't think you know better than Microsoft or Adobe or Apple; just copy the damn thing. The GIMP crew thinks they know better than Adobe how to design a UI, and look at how far that has got them – the butt of every joke in the OSS world. People don't want GIMP, they want an open-source copy of Photoshop, so give that to them. Likewise, people don't want all the "innovative" desktop environments Gnome and KDE are coming out with; they want an open-source copy of the Windows UI. Or better yet an open-source version of Windows; it's amazing to me that ReactOS hasn't gotten more love, when it represents the best potential long-term method for open source to take over the desktop. I know it's not as rewarding for the coders, but if you actually care about the market share of OSS software, this is the way forward. Change the graphics as much as needed for copyright reasons, but copy the look and feel. After all, both Microsoft and Apple got their footholds the same way.
Nimblebit's only available strategy now is to sell themselves to another mega-player (Gameloft?) who has the resources to mount a lawsuit against Zynga.
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But IS there an option to have a copyright or patent violation filed as a CRIMINAL case, or do you have to show how they've escalated the infringement to THEFT by turning a profit? If you're making money off a stolen idea, it's theft because you have paying customers showing it's an item or data of value. If you're just using it for yourself or giving away copies, there is no theft necessarily, just infringement.
I'd argue that THEFT is a CRIMINAL suit if you want to file it as such and give up on collecting damages.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I mean file the charges of theft, not file a civil lawsuit on grounds of theft. Sorry for the fuzzy writing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It would be even worse if game mechanics were copyrightable!
Something worth reading: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/attack-clone-attackers
It wouldn't help because game mechanics are already excluded from U.S. copyright as a "process, system, [or] method of operation" in 17 USC 102(b), which implements the idea-expression divide.
So the question is not whether they CAN pursue Zynga for jail time, it's a question of whether they CHOOSE to, or go for cash instead.
They can do both simultaneously. Or try to. But in this case, if they go to the FBI and file a claim of copyright or trademark infringement, they will be told that it's a civil matter. Criminal copyright infringement only applies to cases where it's absolutely clear that the copying is prohibited. Here, Zynga can plausibly argue based on existing precedent that game rules aren't subject to copyright at all, so they did nothing wrong. The FBI isn't going to waste their time on this kind of hair-splitting, and you can't force the police or FBI to pursue a criminal case if they don't want to.
As to citing cases, get off your lazy ass and search for yourself. I'm not your Google.
You made the argument. Back it up or STFU.
For criminal sanctions for copyright infringement, it now doesn't matter if the infringement was for profit or not. However, the government DOES have to prove that the infringement took place, and that it was willful and deliberate. That's why Zynga cannot and will not be criminally prosecuted; it's not at all clear that what they did was even infringement at all, and even if a civil court ruled that it was, the fact that there were good-faith arguments on the other side indicates the infringing acts were not undertaken willfully and deliberately. Bottom line, no way is the FBI getting involved in this one: if asked, they're going to say it is a civil matter.
Copyrights allow little guys to get into a business
what a shallow, conditioned sentence.
copyrights allow little guys to get into business eh ? where are all the little guys then ? what happened to the people zygna, microsoft, google copied ?
Removing patents and copyrights is not the solution to people exploiting a loophole in the patent/copyright system.
removing patents and copyrights, reverting it to before how it was prior to coming to prominence before 1850, will be the solution. there were copyrights and patents even before 1850, however, free sharing spirit in science, engineering, literature and music was prioritized by the people. when big investors started to get into this new thing they call 'science and applied sciences', things suddenly turned around. and we are rehashing and reiterating what we were able to breakthrough until 1850s. ..............
there is no way to make copyright or patents work. copyright and patents reinforce the established power, and then established power reinforces them. its circular. and small guy has no place in it, unless s/he has the money. and when s/he has the money, small guys become a threat and therefore s/he turns into a big guy and reinforces the cycle.
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So far I feel that this is just the small company not knowing how to play the game and complaining that the pros are winning.
There's a lot of sympathy going for the small guys Zynga "ripped off" but it's too easy to be a noob and hope to take on the pros from the start.
First of all, those who have been ripped off by Zynga could have done things differently. If you have a good game (or think you have one), then you should be able to market it to the masses first. It's especially true for video games that good products get popular quickly (look at Minecraft and Terraria).
If after a few months you still don't have a market, then maybe your game is not that good and you'd need good marketing to make money. Now if you can't afford good marketing, that's your problem. If a competitor comes in, replicates your product and succeeds at selling it, then you were not selling it right in the first place and thank god somebody else succeeded where you failed so that now we can all enjoy a good product.
Tiny Tower and the others - never heard of them. I did hear about Farmville though, and I don't even use Facebook. Why did i hear about the latter and not about the former, if all these games are similar? Probably because Zynga added something to the product that made the public aware of it, or perhaps Zynga made some much needed improvements to the originals. I don't know, but whatever the case, the fact is the originals did not have a market even before Zynga came along, so it's too easy to say Zynga made them fail.
Again, having a basic idea is not enough. If you can't turn your idea into something the public needs or wants, it's your own fault for failing. If a competitor comes along and improves your product the way the public wants it, then that competitor is doing the job you failed to do and it also does a service to the public.
And if you think that the big players have an unfair advantage because they have lots of money, well you're wrong.
If your idea is worth millions, then keep it secret until you can raise the funds to develop it fully. In the meantime, make some cheap games you can sell for a small profit, then use that profit to market your great idea the way you think the big players would do.
If you release your game on a website like Kongregate and then a competitor sells it for iPhone before you do, then that's your fault. Next time, wait until you have the money to release it on the iPhone.
Also, copycats like Zynga are not innovators, therefore if you really are an innovator you should have no problem improving what they "stole" from you and taking the market back. The way I see it, Zynga copied games and made the copies famous. Well, if you own the original, then use the popularity of their games to promote yours: "The Original Farmville" sounds like a great marketing catchphrase to me. You can also take it to the internet: the Tiny Tower guy received a lot of public support after he came out and claimed Zynga copied his game. Well in my case at least, he did exactly this: he used the popular copy's fame to promote his original. As I mentioned above, I never heard of Tiny Tower until the maker came out and claimed Zynga copied his game. Guess what? If he launches Tiny Tower 2 I'll check it out before I check Zynga's copy. But that's assuming he's creative enough to improve the original and create a new version. Is he really? Either he is, or Tiny Tower wasn't a great game and Zynga actually managed to make something good out of it (which would make Zynga the actual innovators in this story).
Just... play the game properly. You're starting small, so be modest and patient. You're not going to build the next Facebook overnight, and even Facebook wasn't ripped off until they got big because they stayed off the radar until they could play on the same field as the pros.
I'm not working for Zynga by the way. I realize I might sound like I really support them, but I don't. However, I'm strongly against copyright, mostly because it's abused by the big guys, bu
It's sad to know that companies have been doing this forever and getting away with it. Its worse to see them get caught, admit to it and still get away with it.
Why bother create anything? SomethingCO will come and take it or steal it eventually. :(
Ah, but because they're PROFITING off the infringement, it escalates to THEFT, a criminal matter.
Though I could see some difficulty proving theft, because you CAN play the Zynga games for free if you want. You don't HAVE to buy the in-game schwag to play. So they just might have found a loophole defense against criminal charges.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Jesus but you're a lazy little fuck, aren't you?
Here. Read. Lazy prick.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/commentary/chn95t1.htm
Dig up the rest yourself. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=videogame+pac-man+copyright+infringement
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
pincus has used all the dirty tricks in the book fucking people over, time to put a bullet in his leg, so that whenever he walks after that, he is reminded at every step that dirty deeds do not go unpunished
do not read as being *that* complex, but their interpretation is constantly being argued in courts across the country.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
That paper you cited is on a completely different issue (lockouts and interoperability). An important issue, but not one relevant to Zynga's alleged actions here.
Ah, but because they're PROFITING off the infringement, it escalates to THEFT, a criminal matter.
No, it doesn't. As I noted, copyright infringement can under some circumstances be considered a crime, but it is not considered theft – it's a completely separate and unrelated offense. And the criminal authorities aren't going to get involved in a case where it is not even clear whether the acts in question constituted infringement in the first place. You can repeat the word "theft" all you want, but it doesn't change the underlying facts: you can't copyright game rules.
Getting a White Knight with a big enough pocket to enforce the "other side of the draconian laws" so that if they decide a "Copyrighted Work" = $375,000, then the software developer says "Hi. My game contains 16,0000 drawn images, of which you made Derivative Works to 12,000 of them. Thanks for the 4.5 Billion in fees!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Gamecloud just interviewed Kenny Dinkin, VP of PlayFirst, a new casual publisher. Dinkin praised PlayFirst's successful game Diner Dash, developed by gameLab:
What I love about Diner Dash is its innovation - it's the platonic ideal of what we were shooting for - a game that had none of the presumed necessary trappings of a gamer's game: It has an everyday metaphor, a female hero who's a regular gal, 2-D graphics, humor and even a job where you work a shift!
"Innovation"! That's so cute! Diner Dash is, in all these respects, a straightforward imitation of Betty's Beer Bar by Mystery Studio. (Mystery is a two-man team based in, believe it or not, Uruguay.)
Later in the same interview, Baghdad Kenny continues:
It's tempting to be conservative and copy stuff. But trying new things is what drives us. We're really enjoying incubating the unique vision of each of our developers. And for me personally, it's exhilarating to oversee a growing portfolio of new ideas.
Source
Everyone who's met the guy knows that Pincus is a class A a**hole. No one I've met actually likes working there. They're just sticking around to cash out. I don't see a bright future for Zynga. All the key employees will jump ship once they can sell their stock. And what's to prevent them from copying all of Zynga's games and marketing them for less? They've got the knowledge and the experience, and they'll have the capital too. Plus the big boys in gaming are jumping in, and they will copy Zynga's games too. EA and so on will hire away all of Zynga's key people once they're free to move on. It will be a race to bottom, with everyone copying everyone else's games, probably farming out development to India or China. That will favor whoever can run the games the cheapest. I think Zynga's best hope is to get bought while they're still riding high. Of course, Pincus will do fine no matter what.
I'm so tired of people arguing that without copyrights there is nothing stopping larger corporations from swooping in and cloning games and "bullying the little guy". Here's the deal, software development takes time, staff, and ultimately money. Larger companies have many options available to them when they see a "little guy with a great game". They could buy the little guy out, negotiate a marketing campaign with them in exchange for royalties, or clone the game. This is a typical business decision of "are the profits worth the labor and time?" Cloning is not always the best choice. Depending on the scope and complexity of the game, it may take them several months if not a year to clone. This becomes even harder if the game is receiving frequent updates or if the numbers driving the game are not very easy to determine. If it takes a larger studio a solid year to create a clone of a game an indie guy has created, that's a solid year head start that the indie has to engage with fans and build a solid community. If the players decide that they'd rather play the clone either because it's better polished, fewer bugs or what not, that's their choice to do so. In the same stretch, there's nothing stopping a little guy from making a simplistic version of a triple A title that contains a few niche features that set it apart. That's the beauty of open competition, it benefits the consumer and not a single business.
So I state again, cloning is not the problem. Casual/mobile games have very little depth and complexity to them allowing very small teams to copy the entire gameplay in a matter of weeks/months. As we improve our software engineering methods and our tools, games and other apps will be easier and easier to create/clone. As a society we need to accept this and get over the stupid belief that we're entitled exclusive rights to ideas and designs we come up with yet disclose to the public. If we continue to go down the path of patents and copyrights, the scope of these laws will get broader and broader until you get to the situation where only big publishers are allowed to make games because they own so many generic gameplay patents that threaten to destroy the business of any developer who isn't in league with them. How does that benefit the consumer?
So to the developers both large and small who create small scope games on highly competitive platforms such as mobile and facebook yet decide to piss and moan and whine about not profiting due to other companies one upping them, it's your own damned fault as you failed to take into account the risks and competition involved. Either move to a more exclusive platform or find better ways to set yourself apart such as building a strong relationship with your fan based and offering more services.
You have to have juice in order to get the feds to move on something. Example, Microsoft accidentally ships an Xbox prototype to the wrong address. Who shows up after the delivery? FBI. Why? Money and power makes the world go round.
As discussed in this econTalk podcast, the current system provides a very strong financial incentive for overly complex laws.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.html
Lawyers write the laws (congress only decided the broad strokes), and the more complex the law, the more money they make. Every added detail is important of course, but there is no financial incentive to ever look at the downside: the overall cost of complexity. So the invisible hand of the market creates more and more complex laws.
Under current laws you could possibly patent them, however.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Do you have any idea how many Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones there were in the early 1980s? And few, if any, of the cloners were ever sued. This is because, as others have noted, you can't copyright game rules. You can trademark the title and copyright the code and graphics, but not stop someone else from independently re-implementing more or less the same game on their own.
The subtle and insidious difference between Zynga and the old clone companies, though, is that the old clone companies were the tiny struggling shops that ripped off successful ideas that had already gained mass-market appeal, while the likes of Namco and Taito kept inventing new things. Here, we have the 800 lb gorilla ripping off the work of the tiny struggling shops and using their brand power to sell them, while the actual inventors don't get jack.
It's a complete inversion of how things used to work. Knockoffs had a bad reputation for being knockoffs because they were generally inferior copies of something that people already knew about. Now, nobody even knows that what they're playing is a knockoff because Zynga's marketing machine drowns out the efforts of everyone else.
I don't know of an easy solution for it, other than to maybe put a bullet between the eyes of thieving sociopaths like Pincus, but it's a pretty fucked up situation where the actual creative talent gets absolutely no compensation and the knockoff artist dominates the market.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
In the UK you can bring a private criminal prosecution against someone, though this right has recently been diluted: you now need the permission of the Director of Public Prosecutions to proceed.
This is an essential right. If the police refuse to prosecute, say, a corrupt politician then the only recourse is a private prosecution.
I'm not generally an advocate for lawyers, but the solution of getting rid of all them is worse than the problem.
If we wrote laws that were deciperable by the "average person", what about the approximately 50% of the population who are below average? At some point the laws will once again become indecipherable if you go down far enough. In essence, the problem is essentially the same except now it affects 35% of the population instead of 99% of the population. Those 35% who don't understand the laws are going to need someone to advocate for them.
www.clarke.ca
Who wants to come up with the next great innovation, when you know damn well that the second you do, some big player with more resources is just going to swoop in and steal it?
People who care? People who get into the software/CS/engineering business because they kinda like, you know, like to build shit and innovate? People who know the different between a job and a career? Crazy idea, I know!!!!
Seriously, who the hell would want to work in a company like Zynga is beyond me. Even in this time and age of job shortages, there are a lot jobs still. Granted that most won't be the R&D type most of us geeks would dream about. But hardly few are actually as twisted as Zynga is. The average software job, though mundane, it stills provides room for innovation and professional growth, however limited, so long as one can intelligently explains the ROI of it.
how you conveniently left out all mention of the words well regulated, I'd have to say that the intellectually dishonest response is not the one you are claiming. See, in the real world nothing is as clear as you would wish it to be.
I'm all for taking an idea and making it better or putting it in a new direction. His memo is completely correct about the iPad/iPod/Google.
But in this case, how is what they are doing any different from Vanilla Ice using the music from "Under Pressure" in "Ice Ice Baby". New musicians playing on different instruments, with an added extra cymbal crash. A judge ruled that he stole the music and he had to shell out a bunch of cash. Can't nimblebit or whoever use that case as a legal precedent? Different code that output almost the same result.
Now to ahead and tackle Habeus Corpus.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literally nobody has given evidence that I am wrong, and in fact they couldn't possibly provide such evidence, since I am stating facts. If you could read, you would realize that the judge dismissed the Xerox lawsuit immediately: "Xerox's lawsuit appeared to be a defensive move to ensure that if Apple v. Microsoft established that "look and feel" was copyrightable, then Xerox would be the primary beneficiary, rather than Apple. The Xerox case was dismissed, for a variety of legal reasons[4]." Xerox management had changed by then, and they were saying in effect: "Sure we gave them permission to use our recipe, but we never would have done so if we knew it was going to actually be so lucrative! We would like a slice of the Apple pie they built with our recipe now please!"
Your claim that you post as AC because you are at work is ridiculous, BTW. It shows the kind of person you are. Either one who slinks in the background and does things you believe to be unscrupulous, like post from work when you are not allowed to do so, and spreading false information in hopes that people will buy it, or (more likely) a liar and an M$ shill.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
more than once. their business model is to steal other's creative work, make many millions then settled out of court for millions of dollars.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/238331/zynga_sued_for_alleged_patent_infringement.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/12/zynga-and-vostu-settle-lawsuit-over-social-games.html
http://gamepolitics.com/2011/02/23/zynga-settles-digital-chocolate-mafia-wars-lawsuit
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/zynga-is-hit-with-countersuit-over-game-designs/
among others...