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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

TTC somehow got a court ruling saying that their copyright on Tetris covers the actual game mechanics [1], so that might be legally risky.

[1] https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris...

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strange I didn't think you could copyright mechanics...

You can't. The whole case rests on trade dress, a form of trademark. They clearly know what they are doing in court, with past episodes being on Nintendo's side in the past. Xio also had a terrible defense, and imo their expert witness falling flat. The evidence presented was also skewed imho, it drives me nuts every time I think about it.

I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.

Any parent on Tetris would have long expired, Tetris was published in 1984.

As far as I know, the general consensus is that you can't, but I've seen this case mentioned in several places as implying that maybe you can. I (not a lawyer, just to be clear) find this case a bit confusing because there are several places where the court seems to conflate mechanics with their presentation/rendering.

After reading about it again/more, I think it might be that people are reading a specific line of reasoning about merger doctrine as applying to copyrightability in general, when it's actually only addressing one part of the overall question of copyrightability and is still accepting that mechanics can't be copyrighted per se because they're functional. But this is still an impression and not something I can rigorously argue at this point, so be sure to consult your lawyer before writing a Tetris clone, I guess.

Totally unrelated, Blockinger on F-Droid is dope!

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