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Tetris Under Fire
Andrew Bednarz writes
"How many people are aware of what The Tetris Company is
doing? They're claiming they own copyright on "the look
and feel and trade dress" of Tetris. They are attempting
to remove all unauthorised tetris games!" Considering
that there are dozens of tetris clones (many distributed
under the GPL) I suspect their quest is futile. I'm not sure
how I feal about this one. Their claim is probably legit,
and the above story compares this to the industry allowing
only one game in a genre, but tetris is tetris- its not a block
game genre, its a specific game with rules we are all familiar
with. Different side scrollers have different rules. Hmm.
Wierd case. What do you think?
If there is a copyright, than that should be the end of the argument. Any blatant copies of the game are illegal and should not be distributed under any licences, especially the GPL. This type of thing will give Linux and the GPL a huge black eye. If it's ok to break this copyright because it is a popular game, why not break all copyrights; including music, books, magazines, hardware and software copyrights, etc. This is not Linux's area this is M$ specialty.
The first Tetris I ever played was the one bundled with the original (b&w) Gameboy. It's a "legit" Tetris, and it's the best one ever. No Tetris clone that I've seen mimics it 100%.
Does bending the rules and twisting the name evade this particular sort of liscensing?
--Threed
go after the Brown Department of Computer Science. The primary intro course here requires the students to build a Tetris clone. It'd be..interesting..to see whether this self-styled 'Tetris Company' is confident enough to take on a university rather than some student who can't afford to defend himself..
(I remember seeing this before..the most amusing thing is where they refer to the creation of anything remotely similar to Tetris as 'piracy' and claim that these games are made from 'inferior materials'..)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
They don't own the Tetris copyright and they can't own it either. Tetris was created in the 60s/70s by a Russian scientist who refused to collect royalties. He essentially made the Tetris name concept and original source code public domain.
If these yahoos choose to sue then take it to a british court because there is no way they can win.
PS : In England, Jamaica and some other commonwealth countries the looser pays all the expenses and when you bring a merit-less case ( like this one ) the courts are extremely hard on you and have bean known to award punitive damages and to fine you for creating public mischief.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
There is a Tetris included with every copy of QT and Troll Tech makes no claims about ownership that I am aware of other than "We wrote this toy so you can poke through the source and see how cool the QT tool kit is".
Troll is small by corporate standards but it would be nice for these gays to pick on them since Troll would win easily and recoup the cost of going to court.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I wrote my own Tetris a while ago, so this issue is of particular concern to me. I have it on my website, but don't charge for it (how the hell are ya going to get anyone to buy a regular tetris game anyway?). I have not made a penny from making it, and never will - only wrote it for something fun to program and play. And until I recieve a court order to remove it, it's going to stay right where it is.
I assume this is a small company, there's no way they have the resources to take every person who's ever written a tetris-like game to court. So I believe this is mostly a bluff.
I don't understand why they have such a beef with us "tetris cloners" anyway. Why don't they spend their time making a newer version and sell it rather than removing all tetris clones and not making any money.
The problem is, as stated, the target is merely a student, and most likely doesnot have access to the required monies to defend himself in what passes for the court of law.