Copyright does not protect game rules, ideas, systems, concepts or methods of playing a game. Copyright only protects items of sufficient authorship, for example: you can not copyright a square. You can however copyright an ornate square that has decorations/artwork on it.
Trademark doesn't protect ideas/concepts either, in fact trademark isn't even applicable unless you call your game "Tetris". Trademark doesn't protect any functional parts of the game either, It is required that a trademark be completely non-functional, this is known as functionality doctrine.
Tetris is copyrighted, as in: the source code is copyrighted, the particular ornate look of the blocks is copyrighted. You can however make your own game that uses the same rules, idea, system, concept and method of playing and it is perfectly legal. I already spoke to their lawyers, The Tetris Company claims copyright infringement based on "look&feel" copyright - claiming that the "look&feel" of their game is copyrighted. Under "look&feel" they cite things like: "the blocks fall, the blocks rotate, the completed lines are removed from the field, the field drops by the number of completed rows". I already checked with the U.S. Copyright office, and they assured me that there is no such thing as "look&feel" copyright. I spoke with lawyers already, they also assured me that there is no such thing as "look&feel" copyright. The only thing The Tetris Company has is the trademark for the name "Tetris", and you're safe from that unless you call your game "Tetris" and use their logos.
Think about it: if there was a "look&feel" copyright, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal and the hundreds of other first person shooters that all look and feel the same would all be infringing Wolfenstein 3D's copyright. There really isn't anything called "look&feel" copyright.
An unlawful monopoly exists because only The Tetris Company controls the market for a product, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct. I took this excerpt from http://www.justice.gov/atr/laws.htm and added "The Tetris Company" to where it said "one firm". The Tetris Company is anti-competitive. Please go to DoJ antitrust web site and file a complaint.
From the DoJ web site:
Information from the public is vital to the work of the Antitrust Division. Your e-mails, letters, and phone calls could be our first alert to a possible violation of antitrust laws and may provide the initial evidence needed to begin an investigation.
So I urge you to file a complaint against The Tetris Company: http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm
Hey, I'm on the same boat. I also made a really awesome game of falling 4th order polyominoes (tetris style game) called BitBlocks. It was wildly successful, had much better ratings than even the official Tetris game by EA. My game was on the Android Market for 3 months, and became one of the top 5 games for the Android. On March 9th it got removed from the Android Market.
Your options are limited. You can't fight The Tetris Company because you can't afford the lawyer expenses. If you did have the money to fight The Tetris Company, you would surely win in court, but the court victory would be a loss for The Tetris Company as well as you because it would mean The Tetris Company no longer has any authority to stop people from making falling block games and there would be a flood of falling block games on the market, perhaps some even better than your game. (See Lotus vs Borland, in the end Borland won, but Lotus and Borland both lost when Microsoft came out with Excel)
What The Tetris Company is doing is anti-competitive. Under The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, monopolizing a trade using anti-competitive practices is a felony punishable by up to $10,000,000 fine and three year jail sentence. According to DOJ web site:
The Sherman Act also makes it a crime to monopolize any part of interstate commerce. An unlawful monopoly exists when only one firm controls the market for a product or service, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product or service is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct.
(http://www.justice.gov/atr/laws.htm) -- that paragraph entirely describes what The Tetris Company is doing with falling block games.
I don't know if the DOJ will care or even lift a finger, but it's worth a try and if people on slashdot can create a big enough wave perhaps they will be swayed to investigate The Tetris Company. You can report antitrust concern here: http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm
So I urge all slashdotters to file a complaint with the Department of Justice. Show you care about tetris, file a complaint against The Tetris Company! It's time we put an end to their monopoly.
Man... you're thinking too complicated. Just put some photos of naked kids on a flash drive and slip it in some guy's pocket, or throw it into the guy's house. Instant cash!
Patents are made for protecting new ideas. Implementations are covered by copyrights if the implementation has substantial amount of non-functional uniqueness.
The source code can be copyrighted, but there's no point since you can easily change the for loops to while loops, rename variables, move functions around to create the same program with different source code.
The big problem with software patents is that USPTO considers "doing old thing in a computer program" to be a new thing, even if "doing old thing" isn't a new idea at all.
I completely agree. I hate buying games on CD/DVD because I end up having to get the crack for it to make it run without the DVD because that makes it load faster, and doesn't require me to fetch the DVD every time I want to play. I hate buying DVD movies because I rather just have my collection of movies on my hard drive, converting from DVD to hard drive format is way too annoying, I rather just download the pirated version. Rare instances where I actually pay for something, I feel like a fool for having done so because it ends up not working right and it's crippled.
You would think it's pretty straight-forward to inflate a balloon and let it go, but apparently there's a way to screw that up too. Forget reaching other planets or even the moon, NASA can't even get a helium balloon off the ground.
All power plants that generate power from heat use steam turbines. The rest use something else to turn the turbines. There's only solar power that converts light directly into electricity without having to spin some turbines.
There aren't too many ways of generating electricity from heat. There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect but it's not nearly as efficient. If you come up with a better way you can change the world.
Ebert commenting on games is like deaf person commenting on music or a blind person commenting on paintings.
Just like you need to hear to understand music and you need to see to understand painting, you need to be able to play it to understand a game.
Whatever you do: don't buy GTA 4 on Steam.... now that I think about it: don't buy it for the PC.
My friend and I bought a copy each hoping we could beat up whores together. It is infinitely complicated to get it working, it has both Steam's checks plus RockStar's DRM checks, it needs microsoft live to play multiplayer, there are no real good instructions on how to even set that up. The game kept crashing on my friend's computer. The multiplayer is a joke, I haven't even gotten one multiplayer game going, eventually I just gave up and uninstalled it. Total waste of money. You can't return things on steam, so that sucks even more.
That's exactly what I was wondering, the change to their game makes no difference at all. It's still the same game, same rules. It would be like William-Sonoma declaring that their new enhanced cereal bowls can also be used as pasta bowls.
The rules of the game don't dictate what words are allowed, the official word list does... and there are already two major word lists: TWL and SOWPODS. All they're doing is adding yet another word list.
Hasbro hasn't made an innovation in decades. The only asset they have is the name Scrabble and a few other names. They're almost as bad as "The Tetris Company" whose only asset is the name "Tetris".
It's a bit harder than porting from ARM to ARM, the software itself isn't written for ARM so the fact that both devices use same underlying processor doesn't make anything easier. In Iphone's case the software is written in Objective C, on the Android the user programs are written in Java.
1. Jump off a cliff.
2. Don't do step 1.
3. Do the opposite of step 2.
4. Don't do step 3.
5. Don't do step 5.
6. Do step 5.
7. Skip step 2 and 5.
8. Perform the steps in reverse order.
9. Do step 4.
10. We're just fucking with you, throw the test out.
11. No we're not, finish the test.
12. Clap your hands if you reached this step.
13. Don't clap your hands at any point during this test.
14. There will be cake.
15. The cake is a lie.
What makes Apple a success is that Apple fully exploits consumer fanaticism. They have a large number of fanatic followers who will worship every word that comes out of Steve's mouth.
At this point it doesn't even matter if the product is good or not, as long as it has the Apple logo, the fanatics will swear by it. It doesn't matter if the product has battery flaws, headphone plug incompatibility, catches on fire randomly, isn't up to par with the latest technology, isn't compatible with established industry standards, has draconian end user license agreements. It's not about any the product anymore.
It's turned into a religion. Trying to convince someone Apple products have flaws like any other product is like talking to a creationist: it's made by Apple and Apple is the greatest because Apple says Apple is the greatest and Apple's word can not be wrong because Apple said it and since Apple is the greatest Apple can't be wrong about Apple being the greatest.
This guys is right in some places, wrong in some others. Changing screen orientation restarts the Activity, but you can tell it in your manifest that you don't want it to automatically restart the Activity on orientation change, giving you the control to do whatever you want.
Android forces you to make the application centered around the Activities, but it's not so bad when you get used to it. It's not necessarily bad, just a bit different.
The debugging? He's definitely being an idiot about this. How is easy debugging a gripe? He's griping that it makes it easier to debug? No, that's just idiotic. Debugging on the Android is very easy and that's a good thing, not bad.
Applications never, ever quit? No, that's not true. I made my app quit save and quit when it goes to background. Other people's apps don't quit. You want your app to quit, you can make it so it quits. Also, if app doesn't quit and goes to background, android will automatically close the background app if it needs the resources to run foreground apps. So they do quit, you can program the app to quit, so he's just plain wrong.
He mentions Java... yes, Java sucks for this. The phone is not very fast to begin with, and running a slow bloated language like Java isn't necessarily the best thing. Java is good for people who don't know how to work with pointers and de-allocate memory, Java is good for people who don't understand programming who want to program things and Java pays for it in performance. Java is like a tricycle compared to low level languages. But the good thing is: it's harder to fall off a tricycle and hurt yourself. With a real programming language you might run into huge problems, late night debugging sessions trying to find where your mistake is. With Java you're playing it safe. Thankfully they provided a NDK, but that's a real pain in the ass, has the speed you want, then has the drawbacks too.
You can get around Java's slowness by following their program optimization guidelines, things like: don't use too many classes, cache calculation results instead of recalculating things, use native java functions ie use indexOf instead of looping through a string. It makes Java bearable.
He mentions platform fragmentation. The main difference between Android devices is their different sized screens. Honestly, that shouldn't be an issue, using XML interface it should all look pretty much the same. If you're doing fancy graphics, you have to be smart and use percentages instead of hard coded sizes for things. Coming from a PC background where users might be running 640x480 or 1600x1200, I think we're all familiar with different screen sizes and how to handle them. Going from 320x480 to 240x320 shouldn't be much trouble for a competent programmer. If you can't handle it, stick to XML interface.
So: Android developing might have it's shortcomings, but they're not as bad as this guy makes it sound. Easy debugging is definitely NOT a shortfall. Also, you can download the android SDK + emulator for free, it runs on Mac, Linux, Windows. Compare that to iPhone, you need to pay $100/year to get the SDK, and even after you get it, you can't run it unless you have a Mac.
Instead of spending $50 for a burner + $80 to get 40x 25GB discs, just spend $70 and get an awesome 1TB Western Digital caviar green. It's faster, cheaper, rewritable, easily accessible, you don't need to find special computer with BD reader to use it, what else could you want?
As for HD DVD and Blu-ray being the new betamax: It's true, they are! I keep all my media on a network drive, and I have a $200 Acer Aspire Revo that can chew through the biggest of the 1080p movies like a hot knife through butter thanks to nvidia ION, hooked up with HDMI output to the TV. The wife couldn't be happier, it's on demand video with none of the problems of having each thing you want to see on a seperate disc.
First: Me, as in First Person Shooter
Second: You, as in a Second Person Narrative
Third: He/She, where the person is neither You nor Me, it's a third party.
Fourth: there is no such thing because Third already encompasses everything that is not First or Second.
There's me (the one who wrote this), you (the one reading this), and them(anyone who is not me or you). You can't just invent a new name for them and pretend you're not referring to them when you say it's them, it's still them.
I find this play on words to be incomprehensibly stupid.
The things you list as "core features" are just addons and patches. Just like NT4, initially Win 9x didn't have USB support either, nor did it have DirectX.
The real core difference between Windows 9x and NT is that Windows 9x is really just a DOS shell just like Windows 3 and earlier. Windows NT is an operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright does not protect game rules, ideas, systems, concepts or methods of playing a game. Copyright only protects items of sufficient authorship, for example: you can not copyright a square. You can however copyright an ornate square that has decorations/artwork on it.
Trademark doesn't protect ideas/concepts either, in fact trademark isn't even applicable unless you call your game "Tetris". Trademark doesn't protect any functional parts of the game either, It is required that a trademark be completely non-functional, this is known as functionality doctrine.
Tetris is copyrighted, as in: the source code is copyrighted, the particular ornate look of the blocks is copyrighted. You can however make your own game that uses the same rules, idea, system, concept and method of playing and it is perfectly legal. I already spoke to their lawyers, The Tetris Company claims copyright infringement based on "look&feel" copyright - claiming that the "look&feel" of their game is copyrighted. Under "look&feel" they cite things like: "the blocks fall, the blocks rotate, the completed lines are removed from the field, the field drops by the number of completed rows". I already checked with the U.S. Copyright office, and they assured me that there is no such thing as "look&feel" copyright. I spoke with lawyers already, they also assured me that there is no such thing as "look&feel" copyright. The only thing The Tetris Company has is the trademark for the name "Tetris", and you're safe from that unless you call your game "Tetris" and use their logos.
Think about it: if there was a "look&feel" copyright, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal and the hundreds of other first person shooters that all look and feel the same would all be infringing Wolfenstein 3D's copyright. There really isn't anything called "look&feel" copyright.
An unlawful monopoly exists because only The Tetris Company controls the market for a product, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct. I took this excerpt from http://www.justice.gov/atr/laws.htm and added "The Tetris Company" to where it said "one firm". The Tetris Company is anti-competitive. Please go to DoJ antitrust web site and file a complaint.
From the DoJ web site:
Information from the public is vital to the work of the Antitrust Division. Your e-mails, letters, and phone calls could be our first alert to a possible violation of antitrust laws and may provide the initial evidence needed to begin an investigation.
So I urge you to file a complaint against The Tetris Company: http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm
Hey, I'm on the same boat. I also made a really awesome game of falling 4th order polyominoes (tetris style game) called BitBlocks. It was wildly successful, had much better ratings than even the official Tetris game by EA. My game was on the Android Market for 3 months, and became one of the top 5 games for the Android. On March 9th it got removed from the Android Market.
Your options are limited. You can't fight The Tetris Company because you can't afford the lawyer expenses. If you did have the money to fight The Tetris Company, you would surely win in court, but the court victory would be a loss for The Tetris Company as well as you because it would mean The Tetris Company no longer has any authority to stop people from making falling block games and there would be a flood of falling block games on the market, perhaps some even better than your game. (See Lotus vs Borland, in the end Borland won, but Lotus and Borland both lost when Microsoft came out with Excel)
What The Tetris Company is doing is anti-competitive. Under The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, monopolizing a trade using anti-competitive practices is a felony punishable by up to $10,000,000 fine and three year jail sentence. According to DOJ web site:
The Sherman Act also makes it a crime to monopolize any part of interstate commerce. An unlawful monopoly exists when only one firm controls the market for a product or service, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product or service is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct.
(http://www.justice.gov/atr/laws.htm) -- that paragraph entirely describes what The Tetris Company is doing with falling block games.
I don't know if the DOJ will care or even lift a finger, but it's worth a try and if people on slashdot can create a big enough wave perhaps they will be swayed to investigate The Tetris Company. You can report antitrust concern here: http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm
So I urge all slashdotters to file a complaint with the Department of Justice. Show you care about tetris, file a complaint against The Tetris Company! It's time we put an end to their monopoly.
Man... you're thinking too complicated. Just put some photos of naked kids on a flash drive and slip it in some guy's pocket, or throw it into the guy's house. Instant cash!
Should be "so the watcher's dog can watch the watcher's sheep."
The source code can be copyrighted, but there's no point since you can easily change the for loops to while loops, rename variables, move functions around to create the same program with different source code.
The big problem with software patents is that USPTO considers "doing old thing in a computer program" to be a new thing, even if "doing old thing" isn't a new idea at all.
Yeah, I too question why they never mention Somalia when talking about piracy.
I completely agree. I hate buying games on CD/DVD because I end up having to get the crack for it to make it run without the DVD because that makes it load faster, and doesn't require me to fetch the DVD every time I want to play. I hate buying DVD movies because I rather just have my collection of movies on my hard drive, converting from DVD to hard drive format is way too annoying, I rather just download the pirated version. Rare instances where I actually pay for something, I feel like a fool for having done so because it ends up not working right and it's crippled.
You would think it's pretty straight-forward to inflate a balloon and let it go, but apparently there's a way to screw that up too. Forget reaching other planets or even the moon, NASA can't even get a helium balloon off the ground.
All power plants that generate power from heat use steam turbines. The rest use something else to turn the turbines. There's only solar power that converts light directly into electricity without having to spin some turbines. There aren't too many ways of generating electricity from heat. There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect but it's not nearly as efficient. If you come up with a better way you can change the world.
Corporations are people too.
Ebert commenting on games is like deaf person commenting on music or a blind person commenting on paintings. Just like you need to hear to understand music and you need to see to understand painting, you need to be able to play it to understand a game.
Whatever you do: don't buy GTA 4 on Steam.... now that I think about it: don't buy it for the PC.
My friend and I bought a copy each hoping we could beat up whores together. It is infinitely complicated to get it working, it has both Steam's checks plus RockStar's DRM checks, it needs microsoft live to play multiplayer, there are no real good instructions on how to even set that up. The game kept crashing on my friend's computer. The multiplayer is a joke, I haven't even gotten one multiplayer game going, eventually I just gave up and uninstalled it. Total waste of money. You can't return things on steam, so that sucks even more.
That's exactly what I was wondering, the change to their game makes no difference at all. It's still the same game, same rules. It would be like William-Sonoma declaring that their new enhanced cereal bowls can also be used as pasta bowls.
The rules of the game don't dictate what words are allowed, the official word list does... and there are already two major word lists: TWL and SOWPODS. All they're doing is adding yet another word list.
Hasbro hasn't made an innovation in decades. The only asset they have is the name Scrabble and a few other names. They're almost as bad as "The Tetris Company" whose only asset is the name "Tetris".
It's a bit harder than porting from ARM to ARM, the software itself isn't written for ARM so the fact that both devices use same underlying processor doesn't make anything easier. In Iphone's case the software is written in Objective C, on the Android the user programs are written in Java.
100gigahertz is nothing, Chuck Norris will give you 100 gigahurts.
1. Jump off a cliff.
2. Don't do step 1.
3. Do the opposite of step 2.
4. Don't do step 3.
5. Don't do step 5.
6. Do step 5.
7. Skip step 2 and 5.
8. Perform the steps in reverse order.
9. Do step 4.
10. We're just fucking with you, throw the test out.
11. No we're not, finish the test.
12. Clap your hands if you reached this step.
13. Don't clap your hands at any point during this test.
14. There will be cake.
15. The cake is a lie.
This takes "paper cut" to a whole new level.
What makes Apple a success is that Apple fully exploits consumer fanaticism. They have a large number of fanatic followers who will worship every word that comes out of Steve's mouth.
At this point it doesn't even matter if the product is good or not, as long as it has the Apple logo, the fanatics will swear by it. It doesn't matter if the product has battery flaws, headphone plug incompatibility, catches on fire randomly, isn't up to par with the latest technology, isn't compatible with established industry standards, has draconian end user license agreements. It's not about any the product anymore.
It's turned into a religion. Trying to convince someone Apple products have flaws like any other product is like talking to a creationist: it's made by Apple and Apple is the greatest because Apple says Apple is the greatest and Apple's word can not be wrong because Apple said it and since Apple is the greatest Apple can't be wrong about Apple being the greatest.
This guys is right in some places, wrong in some others. Changing screen orientation restarts the Activity, but you can tell it in your manifest that you don't want it to automatically restart the Activity on orientation change, giving you the control to do whatever you want.
Android forces you to make the application centered around the Activities, but it's not so bad when you get used to it. It's not necessarily bad, just a bit different.
The debugging? He's definitely being an idiot about this. How is easy debugging a gripe? He's griping that it makes it easier to debug? No, that's just idiotic. Debugging on the Android is very easy and that's a good thing, not bad.
Applications never, ever quit? No, that's not true. I made my app quit save and quit when it goes to background. Other people's apps don't quit. You want your app to quit, you can make it so it quits. Also, if app doesn't quit and goes to background, android will automatically close the background app if it needs the resources to run foreground apps. So they do quit, you can program the app to quit, so he's just plain wrong.
He mentions Java... yes, Java sucks for this. The phone is not very fast to begin with, and running a slow bloated language like Java isn't necessarily the best thing. Java is good for people who don't know how to work with pointers and de-allocate memory, Java is good for people who don't understand programming who want to program things and Java pays for it in performance. Java is like a tricycle compared to low level languages. But the good thing is: it's harder to fall off a tricycle and hurt yourself. With a real programming language you might run into huge problems, late night debugging sessions trying to find where your mistake is. With Java you're playing it safe. Thankfully they provided a NDK, but that's a real pain in the ass, has the speed you want, then has the drawbacks too.
You can get around Java's slowness by following their program optimization guidelines, things like: don't use too many classes, cache calculation results instead of recalculating things, use native java functions ie use indexOf instead of looping through a string. It makes Java bearable.
He mentions platform fragmentation. The main difference between Android devices is their different sized screens. Honestly, that shouldn't be an issue, using XML interface it should all look pretty much the same. If you're doing fancy graphics, you have to be smart and use percentages instead of hard coded sizes for things. Coming from a PC background where users might be running 640x480 or 1600x1200, I think we're all familiar with different screen sizes and how to handle them. Going from 320x480 to 240x320 shouldn't be much trouble for a competent programmer. If you can't handle it, stick to XML interface.
So: Android developing might have it's shortcomings, but they're not as bad as this guy makes it sound. Easy debugging is definitely NOT a shortfall. Also, you can download the android SDK + emulator for free, it runs on Mac, Linux, Windows. Compare that to iPhone, you need to pay $100/year to get the SDK, and even after you get it, you can't run it unless you have a Mac.
Instead of spending $50 for a burner + $80 to get 40x 25GB discs, just spend $70 and get an awesome 1TB Western Digital caviar green. It's faster, cheaper, rewritable, easily accessible, you don't need to find special computer with BD reader to use it, what else could you want?
As for HD DVD and Blu-ray being the new betamax: It's true, they are! I keep all my media on a network drive, and I have a $200 Acer Aspire Revo that can chew through the biggest of the 1080p movies like a hot knife through butter thanks to nvidia ION, hooked up with HDMI output to the TV. The wife couldn't be happier, it's on demand video with none of the problems of having each thing you want to see on a seperate disc.
That's a good idea.
First: Me, as in First Person Shooter
Second: You, as in a Second Person Narrative
Third: He/She, where the person is neither You nor Me, it's a third party.
Fourth: there is no such thing because Third already encompasses everything that is not First or Second.
There's me (the one who wrote this), you (the one reading this), and them(anyone who is not me or you). You can't just invent a new name for them and pretend you're not referring to them when you say it's them, it's still them.
I find this play on words to be incomprehensibly stupid.
... squeeze like you're milking a cow but with the palm ...
I have no idea what that is. The closest I've gotten to touching a cow is a Gateway computer.
Wake up, 3Dfx is dead already. They got what they deserved.
The things you list as "core features" are just addons and patches. Just like NT4, initially Win 9x didn't have USB support either, nor did it have DirectX.
The real core difference between Windows 9x and NT is that Windows 9x is really just a DOS shell just like Windows 3 and earlier. Windows NT is an operating system.