I am not a lawyer either. Note that according to Wikipedia there was a lot of specificity in the copying in Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures: "the court cited the angle, layout, and details of the four city blocks depicted; the use of color on the horizon and sky; the distinctive lettering used in both for place names as well as the title at the top; and the overall stylistic impression of the two works". I am uncomfortable with that decision myself, though, and I'm even more uncomfortable with the alas well-settled law that fictional characters can be copyrighted.

What is most relevant to the Zynga case, though, seems to be the fact that US Copyright Office refuses to issue copyrights on game rules.

When the Tetris folks try to squash all the Tetris clones, people here think that's bad, and we're right that it's bad to squash Tetris clones. There is no copyright on concepts. But the same applies here. It shouldn't matter too much if it's a big company copying the ideas of a small developer did or a small developer cloning the ideas of a big company. It would, of course, be polite for the big company to offer some sort of thanks, though.

I looked at the side-by-side screenshots, and while the basic (uncopyrightable) gameplay ideas are very parallel and presumably copied, the graphics (which are copyrightable) are significantly different in style. And looking at coin amounts in the two screenshots, it looks like the rules weren't copied either (not that there would be anything wrong with copying rules, since there is no copyright on game rules, only on their written expression).

Early in January, I released on Amazon's Appstore a popular app aimed at the Kindle Fire to dim the too-bright screen. About two weeks later, two others appeared. I don't know if there was copying of ideas going on. But even if there was, what's the big deal? The competing apps have somewhat different interfaces, and differ a little bit in feature set, and now consumers have more choice. And inspiration in respect of additional features can go both ways, and as a result all the apps can get better.

If you don't take any notes, you'll be in trouble if there something detail-oriented that's not in the book, unless you're really smart.

I wonder if the recommendations depend on how detail-oriented and textbook-centered a course is. I teach philosophy. It certainly happen when I teach more advanced classes that I come up with new arguments and proofs right on the spot. They aren't in the assigned books, they aren't in the assigned articles, and because I came up with them on the spot (e.g., in response to a student question), there is no handout with it. But few students will correctly remember an eight step metaphysics argument or a hard logic proof without notes, or at least without taking a photo of the board.

And for shorter distances it's much better. But the latency...

I generally try to have apps I work on support Android 1.6 and up. It's really not at all hard to do that, unless you need OpenGLES 2.

Actually, cheap data plans in some cases can be a reason to stay on a relatively dumb phone, as long as it has a decent browser (and I think there is at least one HTC feature phone that has a good Opera browser). I'm on a no-longer available $30/month 500 minute, unlimited data/text SERO plan with Sprint. I am currently using a Treo 700. According to Sprint, if I were to switch to a more modern "smart phone" (by Sprint's definition), I'd have to switch to a new, much more expensive plan. So if my Treo dies in such a way that it doesn't make economic sense to repair it (I've made minor repairs on its keyboard so far), it could potentially make economic sense to switch to a feature phone with a decent browser so I could stay on the plan, rather than paying the smart phone surcharge.

IANAL, but I would think that the actual damages for infringing on a license by unauthorized redistribution (say, redistribution of GPL software without source code) would be a reasonable estimate of how much an alternate commercial redistribution license for the project would cost. If the project has negotiated such licenses with other companies in the past, that could provide data for an estimate. Failing that, I suppose one could look at relevantly similar projects and how much an alternate license costs for them.

Just make a trial version that expires after x days and points the user to the paid version. (Don't worry about the small number of users who will uninstall and just re-install the trial. That's a lot of work to do every x days, if x is small.)

There is still the question of getting the swipes in the right order.

When I wrote a PictureLogin beta app for Palms (back in 2007; no, it's not prior art for the MS patent, as it was tap-only rather than swipe), I made PictureLogin act as a quick login screen, with an immediate fallback to the default passkey login if it failed. It would be very unlikely an attacker would get in on the first try, but it would allow users to have a very fast login with as few as two taps, or maybe even with only one if one was willing to take a risk. That would also help with the fingerprint problem. I think I was also thinking about some security-by-obscurity options, such as a user using some fake form as their PictureLogin image, so that someone who stole or found the device would not know that it's actually a PictureLogin login screen. You turn it on, and you see some normal Palm screen. You tap once or twice in the right place(s) and you're in, and you tap even once in the wrong place and fall back. I never got around to a full release of PictureLogin, though the code is open source.

Including 9366 bytes worth of images. It's been pretty steady since 1992 or so (initially hosted over ftp instead of http as my Dept didn't have an http server yet).