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US District Court: Game Elements In Tetris Clone Infringe Tetris Co.'s Copyright
elegie writes "In the US, a District Court has ruled that the Tetris clone "Mino" infringes the Tetris Company's copyrights with regard to elements of the Tetris game design and gameplay. On one hand, a lawyer said that 'a puzzle game where a user manipulates blocks to form lines which disappear' would be noninfringing. At the same time, the Mino game's reuse of such Tetris elements as the dimensions of the playing field and the shape of the blocks constituted infringement. In addition, the Tetris game's artistic elements were not inseparably linked to the underlying mechanics and replicating an underlying idea and/or functionality (which would likely be uncopyrighted) would not justify copying visual expression from an existing game."
I'm glad we can make a non-infringing block game, now we just need to figure out how to get those blocks to not infringe.
The Tetris Co. has been pushing very, very hard for this decision for years, and it's a bad one for everyone except Tetris Co. Where does this begin and end - is Activision going to sue everyone for making a team-based playing-soldiers first person shooter, because it infringes on the Call of Duty copyright? In fact how does this translate to the copyrighting of 'real life' game concepts and other similar idea-based concepts? Are we going to be able to patent games now?
This is a very, very bad precedent. Yay for the typical scenario of 'person or company with the most money de facto writes the laws.'
The real crime here is that Tetris is still protected under copyright.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
shape of the blocks constituted infringement
That's absurd. The shape of the blocks comes from the fact that those are all the possible 2D geometric arrangements of 4 connected blocks on a grid. If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.
Why is a court/patent fight still allowed over Tetris? I mean, it's an old game from 19-freaking-84!!! The answer must, as usual, be $$money$$. (from Wikipedia...) Tetris (Russian: ) is a tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, [2] while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. [3] He derived its name from the [Russian] numerical prefix tetra-(all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport. [4][5] It is also the first entertainment software to be exported from the USSR to the U.S. and published by Spectrum Holobyte for Commodore 64 and IBM PC. The Tetris game is a popular use of tetrominoes, the four element special case of polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the name was given by the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the enumeration of pentominoes is dated to antiquity. (from Wikipedia)
You don't need to break down and analyze which individual details make a Tetris clone a Tetris clone that violates copyright versus a Tetris clone which doesn't; it's quite clear at first glance that Mino is just simply Tetris. I know this sort of thing is a popular debate, and this is hardly the first example of its kind, but the extremely wide range of Tetris clones that survive without legal problems do so because their developers make at least the bare minimum effort to change something fundamental. Note, that's not to suggest TTC doesn't go after several of these as well, but they are certainly far less successful in those cases.
I think the point here is that if EA had taken this exact game and released it as their official licensed version of Tetris for iOS, no one would be the wiser. I understand that EA's official version isn't spectacular and we all wish we could play something much better without threats of legal action being thrown around, but the decision is really clear cut in this case, so I don't think it's unreasonable to cut TTC some slack here, or the DC judge in this case.
For anyone still shaking their fists in anger at TTC, I'd just like to point out this snippet from the article: "Xio readily admitted that Mino purposefully and deliberately copied from Tetris." He wanted this fight, and he lost.
The VISUAL shape of the objects and dimensions of the grid may be copyrightable, but the MATHEMATICAL ones should not be. If there is only one reasonable visual shape that matches the mathematical shape, then it, too, should not be copyrightable.
Remember Rubik's Cube? There were knock-off puzzles of various shapes including spheres, cubes with the corners cut off, various different color schemes, etc. But they were all mathematically identical to the Rubik's Cube.
A Tetris-like game with squiggly-snake-shaped pieces - or even "snakes" themselves - and a grid that is based on rectangles or any other shape that stacks as rectangles do that is the mathematically the same number of units wide and tall as the original Tetris can have identical game play but should be sufficiently different as to avoid copyright protection.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The triominoes will be boring, the pentominoes will be very, very hard.
And how: http://www.cathelius.co.uk/flash/pentrix I gather the author had to add the 'settling' mechanic because otherwise it was as friendly as one of those statistically-worst piece Tetris games.
Here's a thought.... What if you made a game where you could choose an upper and lower bound on the piece size? Set it to 4 and 4 and you have Tetris, but set it to, say 3 and 5 and you'd have a mix of tri-, tetr-, and pentominoes. Is it still infringing if the config options can be tweaked to mimic Tetris?
While I'd agree with the court that the clone (Mino) infringes on the Tetris copyright, the analysis that the court used to get there suffers from some defects in its application. Some of this may be due to the parties in the suit, for not raising certain arguments or making them well, but that's really not much of an excuse.
The court is correct that the Tetris program is not protected in its entirety by copyright, and that one of the key issues in the case is to sort out what is and isn't protected. Basically, copyright protects certain expressions of an idea, but not the underlying idea itself. It does not protect procedures, processes, systems, or methods of operation. This includes the rules of a game, which constitute the procedure for playing it. Thus any part of Tetris that is present because the rules of the game -- however arbitrary those rules might be -- require it, isn't a matter of creative expression, but a necessary incident of implementing tetris. (Creativity in copyright law, you see, is all about making choices)
Where the court errs is in determining the rules:
Tetris is a puzzle game where a user manipulates pieces composed of square blocks, each made into a different geometric shape, that fall from the top of the game board to the bottom where the pieces accumulate. The user is given a new piece after the current one reaches the bottom of the available game space. While a piece is falling, the user rotates it in order to fit it in with the accumulated pieces. The object of the puzzle is to fill all spaces along a horizontal line. If that is accomplished, the line is erased, points are earned, and more of the game board is available for play. But if the pieces accumulate and reach the top of the screen, then the game is over. These then are the general, abstract ideas underlying Tetris and cannot be protected by copyright nor can expressive elements that are inseparable from them.
As a long-time tetris player, I think that the court left a few rules out. First, tetris blocks are tetrominos -- shapes that can be formed from an assemblage of four squares each of which abuts at least one other square, both along their edges. Tetris uses all seven possible tetrominos. This is a functional aspect of the game, just like an American football has a particular size, shape, and other qualities. If football were played with, say, a baseball, it would greatly change the game. So too with Tetris and its blocks.
Second, the size and shape of the playing field is functional. An analogy: While a baseball field's dimensions can vary due to local conditions (e.g. Fenway Park's left field is short because of an adjacent street), it should be about 300 to 400 feet. Imagine how different the game would be if you tried to play baseball at Mick Shrimpton Memorial Field, where due to a mistake in the blueprints the field is only 300 inches long. Could you play a decent game in a field where home runs only need to go 25 feet? You'd better have a hell of a pitcher. Who incidentally, is comfortable standing 5 feet in front of the batter. Fields that fall within a particular range are a part of the game of tetris.
It's true that a small variation in the dimensions of the tetris playing field might not matter much, at least not to casual players. (Experts are probably highly sensitive to this.) So perhaps an argument could be made that since it needn't be a particular size and shape, and thus they are creative, copyrightable material. However, there are probably only a few small variations possible before the effect does become noticeable and affects play. In copyright, when you have a feature of a work that is creative but there are only a few possible choices that express the same uncopyrightable idea (e.g. "It was a dark and stormy night" could be "It was a pitch-black and tempestuous night" but even with a good thesaurus, there's not a hell of a lot of ways of saying the same thing), the expression is deemed to have merged with the idea. This prevents people f
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.