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Exactly. Here's what the US copyright office says[1]...

"Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form."

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

Someone else mentioned the Atari and Munchkin case. The facts were similar. North American developed K.C.Munchkin and originally wanted to obtain a PAC-MAN license. When they were unable to do so, they came up with the K.C.Munchkin name and changed a number of features.

The appeals court ruled in favor of Atari and granted an injunction against North American:

http://www.patentarcade.com/2005/04/case-atari-v-north-ameri...

Actual ruling:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1643313902072203...

I think your arbitration idea has merit, though the DMCA's claim/counterclaim process was designed to handle this type of situation.

Yeah i tried to disclaim it with "it is supposed" because the rulings have been all over the board. I agree that the claim/counterclaim should be used properly but, for me personally if I where Apple I would arbitrate to CYA alone. It's a small price to pay, to be able to prove you exhausted all means to arbitrate the dispute as a third party. I think most would rule out liability on Apples part if they did so.

Copyright is supposed to cover the actual code written

True

if the original code base and images where not used... then there should be no infringement.

Not so true anymore. Copying a work doesn't mean Xeroxing it. You can do 100% of the work, draw all the images yourself etc. As long as the output is, shall we say, unreasonably similar then it is copyright infringement. In this case all he had to do is not directly copy the artwork and everything would have been free and clear. Look at the images of the tanks in both games it is pretty open and shut to me.

Copyright covers the creative work, not the output of the creative work. So code, images protected. The pretty glowy lines produced when work is "executed", not protected.

Of course, everything (in U.S. legal system) is debatable and usually the party with most $$ (for lawyers) wins the debate.

I agree, but the author attempted to work with Atari to license Battlezone. Also, the game has been out for a while without complaint from Atari. These both seem to make Atari seem less of a victim.

As an aside, Atari is really Infogrames. The real Atari is no more.

This is astoundingly incorrect. At least where I live (int he US) copyright protects the game binary code, the game assets, the game's manual, etc. but doesn't protect the overall game concept or the game's general look and feel. Those things are in the realm of patent protections.

The OP is confusing a moral right (rather, a moral wrong, i.e. he clearly was making a Battlezone clone) with a legal wrong. The game breaks no copyright laws.

I was involved in a very similar situation, where a publisher made a copyright claim against a game of mine in the app store. But you can't copyright a game idea, or the way the tanks generally look. You can only copyright the actual game, or game assets. We pushed back and Apple accepted our arguments and the game went back into the store.

This is abuse of copyright for the sole purpose of eliminating a competitor in the app store, and it's got to be fought, or we're all going to be spending huge portions of our lives as developers fighting incorrect and spurious copyright claims.

You can only copyright ... game assets.

What do you think the tanks are? He made his game's tank assets identical to their tank assets. It doesn't matter if he ripped them from a rom or modeled them up himself he copied their assets.