elegie - Slashdot User

Submission + - US District Court: Game elements in Tetris clone infringe Tetris Co.'s copyright

Submitted by elegie on Thursday June 21, 2012 @01:54AM

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.

Comment Concerns over Tetris games back in the day (Score 1) 290

by elegie on Friday February 18, 2011 @09:39AM (#35242642) Attached to: Takedown Letters For WP7 <em>Tetris</em> Clones

Depending on where one looks, legal concerns over the Tetris game are not necessarily new. In 1989, the notable game Tetris: The Soviet Mind Game, which was produced by Tengen, was removed from the market after a legal ruling against Tengen. (It would be interesting to know as to whether the actual issue was one of copyright or trademark.) In addition, it has been said that there was a now-obscure Tetris game that was released for the Sega Megadrive console.

Over the years, there have been multiple instances where games have resembled existing games. For instance, on the Apple Macintosh platform, there was the shareware Bakudanjin game which has been regarded as a clone of the Bomberman video game. (According to the iDevGames "Bakudanjin Postmortem" article, producing a game that constituted a clone was one of the aspects that didn't work so well with the Bakudanjin project, even though the Bakudanjin game was successfully released.) In addition, there was the freeware Arashi game which is said to be similar to the Tempest video game.

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