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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.
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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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.
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
This was in a SF Weekly article back in 2010. http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/
Which would be important if there were any laws being broken, but there aren't.
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.
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