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."

Comments

Oh good

[jesseck]

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.

Re:Oh good

[kanto]

easy, make your own shapes, colors, dimensions and game play. instead of falling have them come in from all directions.

there have been so many Sim City/Civilization clones over the years and each one has been unique. it just takes a little work

I think you need to read the history of Tetris to understand the irony of the situation.

Re:Oh good

[zzyzyx]

Yeah, all they had to do was come up with their own arrangements of 4 square block pieces.

Re:Oh good

[makomk]

The Tetris pieces are just tetrominos - they're every possible shape you can create by joining four squares together. You can't come up with your own similar shapes because there aren't any more of them.

Re:Oh good

[camperdave]

Tetris itself is not new. It's based on a very old Russian toy/puzzle.

Source, please.

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/smmg/archive/1997/radin.html
It may not be Russian, but polyomino tiling puzzles are at least 100 years old.

Re:Oh good

[spazdor]

I'm afraid "four" is not a complex or original enough concept to warrant intellectual property protection.

three would yield a total of 2 possible shapes, and five yields 24 shapes, which quickly makes things unwieldy and complex. Using tetrominoes rather than pentominoes or triominoes is an obvious decision for anyone skilled in the field of game design.

The Real Crime

[cffrost]

The real crime here is that Tetris is still protected under copyright.

Re:The Real Crime

[Yvanhoe]

You say it like copyright was supposed to expire one day...

Re:The Real Crime

[neyla]

Some of them perhaps. I think copyright should be determined experimentally in that it is progressively shortened until such point where you clearly see a fall in new works, then left at a point where they're short enough to hurt creators noticeably, but long enough that the effect is "noticeable" not "catastrophic".

For videogames, I think that'd mean 10 years. Certainly not 30. If all 10-year-old video-games where freely available, I think this would harm the new-game market noticeably, but not catastrophiccally. (notice how that's already close to true: 10 year old video-games, even AAA titles, can be had for a dollar a piece or something like that)

Copyright aren't supposed to stop people from independently creating their own similar works though: just because painter A made a portrait of a woman looking to the left while sitting in front of an oak-tree with a red apple in her hand, it doesn't stop painter B from doing the same thing.

The shape of the pieces in tetris aren't creatively distinct, instead they are mathemathically determined: they're the full set of all possible 4-squares connected pieces.

It's like claiming 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 is a creative selection of 3-digit binary numbers, when infact it's just an exhaustive list of *all* 3-digit binary numbers.

Huh?

[GrahamCox]

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.

Re:Huh?

[TheSpoom]

If anyone is infringed here, it's basic geometry.

It's The Tetris Company. Don't give them ideas.

Re:Not a good precedent

[Gideon Wells]

[quote] You see, Tetris is a very simple game, there's no hidden levels of depth to it. It's blocks falling and you arrange them to make lines that disappear.[/quote]
Sir, I pray for your soul that no serious Tetris fanatics get a hold of this comment. You do not fathom the degrees and tournament rules they have developed over what is or isn't allowed. Dare I even mention the black market, and underground games? The unlicensed, hard core stacking where two people enter, one person leaves?

I would recommend that you start packing your bags now and moving to a third world country. I fear they may already be planning for you to wake up with the head of a T block in your bed tomorrow.