Comment by xkapastel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkapastel | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time liking Tetris due to the fact that it's basically illegal to make a clone. The Tetris Company is very aggressive about shutting down any popular clones. It seems pointless to invest energy in Tetris when they simply do not want any nonlicensed implementations to exist. The author of an older clone expresses this sentiment:

> More importantly, the lead developer of LOCKJAW is a fan of free software, or software that the public can improve and share, as a means to protect the rights of users of computing devices. He does not share the belief expressed by Alexey Pajitnov, co-founder of The Tetris Company, that free software "should never have existed" because it "destroys the market." (Mr. Pajitnov explained further in a 2015 interview with Matt Barton.) But what really destroys the market is monopoly.

> In fact, though Mr. Pajitnov and his partner Henk Rogers want Tetris to become an internationally competitive sport, as Mr. Pajitnov mentioned in earlier in the same interview, a policy against free software makes it that much harder. Imagine if there were a Basketball Company LLC that could sue a city or school district for copyright infringement for putting a basketball court with correct dimensions into a city park or school gymnasium. There are multiple competing suppliers of basketball and chess equipment, unlike software for playing Tetris. This is why Chess is a sport and Tetris is not: Chess has no owner.

http://pineight.com/lj/

Matt: So this is back in 2008 I saw an interview you had done it was posted on slashdot’s, I came across it. It was in a different language. You said something about free software and first I will run this by you and see if it is accurate or not. So they quoted you as saying free software should never have existed. I am wondering is that accurate that translation?
Alexey: Yes, I am not sure I don’t remember me saying it back in 2008, but I could sign this work now.
Matt: What do you not like about it?

Alexey: Basically, if it is just a very small piece of software which young guy need to show off came up and tried to please his friends, that is fine. It might be free, but generally the good games as the result of very hard work of several people, I just don’t understand why those people should work for free. It never happens in this world you know? So it is very honest and normal work, which doesn’t make anyone immediately millionaire or anything like that. it is a hard job, which needs to be compensated and the price of, and smile small price of the game should make it. I feel it is absolutely normal and proper way to develop this stuff. So people don’t, somehow people are rigid to pay kind of 4 dollars for small couple or few and then do it for 10 minutes, but they have trouble to pay kind of half of this price and get 3 or 4 hours of really good time with the game. That is ridiculous.

http://mattchat.us/?p=1021

I remember how in the former Eastern Bloc back in the 1990s, there was a widespread dislike of Stallman-esque ideas of Free Software, probably because idealism of any sort had been totally discredited by the failure of the socialist regimes. And yet, many of the same people who insisted that Free Software was a daft idea because “creators need to be paid”, would not think twice about using popular commercial software like The Bat! email client without paying, by downloading a cracked version from a warez community.

So many people don't realise that Free (Libre) software can be sold, and that there exist several ways to monetize Libre software to successfully support creators and Devs.

Several ways, none of which are any good for a lot of software.

You can sell free software, but it is very much the exception rather than the rule, and it is pretty disingenuous of those who promote it to keep making this claim.

That's odd, because in the Eastern bloc a lot of people copied and shared ZX homebrew like it was no tomorrow. Bear in mind some anarcho-socialist people didn't like the Stalinist regimes. Heck, the Jugoslavs (Tito die-hard socialists) didn't like the personal policies on how to behave by the Soviets/DDR.

ZX homebrew didn't claim to be creating a better world and a whole new economy. As I said, it was the mere idealism of Free Software that turned a lot of people off.

Exploiting old hardware for fun/saving money it's a bit idealistic, albeit a personal/reduced group based one.

As a free software proponent, I don't see the inconsistency in this case.

What would you do as a software oriented person if you had nothing to eat? Why would you care about artificial software scarcity imposed by a government that can't even guarantee working people food on the table?

You might be underestimating how traumatic and desperate an experience the nineties were for so many people in eastern Europe. People are obviously not very forthcoming with the hardest of their stories, but here's one anecdote.

A very close friend - an engineer during the Soviet era- hadn't been paid his wage for months on end. He survived for an entire week in ~1994 on a "creatively sourced" giant box of bananas. For a week. On bananas!

What does something like that do to people? How would you react in a similar situation?

I'm pretty curious about this -- how are clones illegal? Is it via patents or trademarks? If trademark, what if someone renames the clones? If patent, how has it continued for 30+ yrs? Also, did they get global IP protection on this? If they have indeed managed this, i'm surprised they are not being cited as a case study of "what to do" in business schools and consulting firms!

I was working on a reply and wanted to do some research into verifying some things, but here is an article (there may be better articles out there):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/defining-tetris-how-c...

But the courts have ruled that making a game with the exact elements (tetronimos, ghost pieces, next-piece, 8x10 rows) infringes copyright. You cannot make a Tetris-clone without saying Tetris, without infringing on those elements. EVEN if you add additional functionality (the game in the article had powerups, etc,)

Every BSD except MirBSD has tetris(6) in games.tgz.

If tetris(1) get purged I suppose a sudoku clone would fit

the gap, or some ncurses Arkanoid clone.

and since we are talking operating systems, also emacs :)

Copyright.

The specifics of Tetris, including the use of tetrominos and the dimensions of the board -- are protected by copyright which The Tetris Company has successfully defended in court.

It may suck, but as The Tetris Company and the Blurred Lines ruling have shown, copyrights in the USA are pretty broad. In general, it is a violation of copyright to make a clone of a game; see Atari v. Philips in which the court found that cloning Pac-Man was illegal, despite the cloned game having completely different code, assets, and subtly different mechanics. This is why I believe Oracle v. Google will be ruled in favor of Oracle.

In addition, The Tetris Company owns trademarks on the shapes of the tetromino pieces themselves, so even without broad copyright protection, all clones of Tetris would still be illegal.

You have a Tetris in every BSD install and OSX, and with any Emacs.

Emacs was forced to remove M-x yow because of copyright concerns.

The same is bound to happen, sooner or later, to Tetris.

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