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Zynga Sues EA For 'Anti-competitive' Practices
An anonymous reader writes "In early August, Electronic Arts sued Zynga for allegedly copying EA's Sims Social game. Zynga has now launched a counterattack, suing EA for 'anticompetitive and unlawful business practices, including legal threats and demands for no-hire agreements.' The company also accuses EA of copying a Zynga game called YoVille. Zynga has also demanded a jury trial to settle EA's claims."
Who's side are we supposed to be on?
Battle for Wesnoth's LOL
Good question. Certainly neither party to the lawsuit, and most definitely not with the lawyers. I'd have to say hope for all three to lose?
This is one of the few times where I'll be cheering for the lawyers to suck as much money out of both of them as possible.
Sorta like watching Stalin go after Hitler. You want Stalin to win, but not win by too much.
Maybe, with little luck, Zynga can get stomped into oblivion (SCO-style would be nice), and EA loses so much money chasing it that they themselves are diminished to the point of leaving an opening for other companies.
But then there's Ubisoft. Is there anyway we can get Ubisoft involved in this too? Then maybe we can pray that they all obliterate each other.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Neither. As in political reporting, the concept of "sides" is one way that journalists turn stories into BS because they have vested interests in the public not learning what's really going on.
You gotta give Zynga credit though, it takes some VERY large brass balls to basically say "We stole your product and now we are gonna sue you....because you won't let us steal more of your products."
Which is why I can't see how ANYBODY can defend Zynga in this case. Is EA run by douchebags? Yes it is, and thanks to their douchebaggy ways EA is now up for sale, showing that refusing to buy from companies that treat you like shit works, even if it takes awhile.
But with Zynga the ONLY reason you haven't heard of this before is they were stealing from the little devs that couldn't fight back. Look up any of their games, going back to the very first ones like Farmville and you'll find an indie dev that had put out the EXACT SAME GAME one to two years before, and I mean the EXACT same game, Zynga doesn't bother to change shit but the name!
We don't let ANY other artform do this, I can't put out my own version of "Lord Of The Rings" with every character and word of dialog and simply rename it "Lord Of The Bracelets" and not get my ass sued off, I can't hire studio musicians to knock off the songs on the top 10 and simply change the title and put out my own top ten mega mix albums, so why in the fuck should Zynga be allowed to steal every damned thing, from the characters to the art style to the fricking UIs, slap a new name on it and then sell it?
If you can't see how this is seriously bad for indies then you are blind. if Zynga gets away with this why should I buy "Plants VS Zombies" when some corp will hire a bunch of Chinese coders and I can have "Shrubs VS The Undead" next week for free on FB? Why buy Minecraft when I can have MineBuilder for free? One of the great things that has come along is the way the Internet allows small artists to compete and sell their wares no different than the big guys, but if this kind of shit isn't stopped when it comes to games they won't have a prayer, either they work for the megacorps who have enough money to sue, or everything they do will be taken from them. That is frankly a shitty choice and as much as I don't care for EA they are 100% in the right on this one and I hope they crush Zynga like the bugs that they are, go EA!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Gameplay mechanics can not be copyrighted.
How close were Zynga's copies
Pretty close to adding a mustache to the mona lisa and calling it an original work of art.
Dude, look up "Zynga rips off indie" in the search engine of your choice and be ready to shit brick, because as another poster put it "Its like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and calling it an original artwork". Look up "The Farm" I believe it was called and compare it to farmville, hell pick ANY game they have and look up its name and "ripoff" and you'll find that some little indie had put out a game one to two years before and once it started gaining a few users? here comes Zynga and a pile of their Chinese coders to bold face rip it off!
Hell look up the EA court papers man, they have in it side by side photos, they fucking stole EVERYTHING. The characters, their animations, the thought bubble, the UI, the sound, they might as well have just took EA's code and stuck their name on it, it's THAT blatant.
Look, I got NO problem with taking a basic idea and making your own take, look at how we have a bazillion tower defense games, Good God half the FPS games out there are so generic war themed you could place them side by side and it looks like "Generic action movie #47" but that is NOT what we have here, they did NOT put out their own take, what they did is more like taking tracing paper and just ripping it off frame by frame!
Please look it up for yourself Bob, I know how you feel. When I first heard of this I thought "So they both have Sims style games, so what?" but holy shit, they didn't even fricking pretend to have an original thought, it was a pixel to pixel copy. I'm not shitting you either, one of the EA guys actually took measurements and more than 3/4th of the artwork is even pixel by pixel sized so damned identically you could mix and match between the two games and nobody would notice! I'm sure after you see the pics, especially of the little indie guys that could afford to fight back, that Zynga deserves to die and EA deserves to win, this is just pure theft, no bones about it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Is it not an original work of art?
That's kind of a bad example because art is all about perception and some sort of statement from the artist. Would you say Andy Warhol was infringing upon Campbell's IP?
Just what exactly makes something original? I would actually claim that the work of art you propose is original because it is striking and thought provoking. It's the Mona Lisa, but why does she have a stache? Why are there 10 pictures in a row? Why does this one have a goatee?
In Zynga's case so much was copied, most people would put in the high 90's as a percentage, it is hard to claim any kind of originality, or even attempt at originality in their work.
However, just how many ways can you abstract a simulated environment in such cartoonish ways? While Zynga clearly needs to get bent over by the courts and a proper financial ass reaming, we should still be careful on just how broad of a protection we give works like this. Especially, when originality as far as art is concerned is so amazingly subjective.