So we're gonna side with Zynga on this because it is innovating by bringing The Sims to Facebook and EA is trying to block innovation with IP lawsuits here, right?
I've noticed a lot of comments here state that "you can't copyright a genre". These are people who did NOT read the complaint or see the screenshots comparing The Ville with the Sims. GO and READ the complaint. Jesus, it's one click away. Just skim all the way through it and look at the pictures. It is blatant copying. No mistake. Pure facts. Cloning. Copyright infringement.
Zynga might have finally bit off more than it could chew. Lets hope it chokes and dies a miserable and embarrassing death.
These are multinational corporations. Applying labels like good-guy, bad-guy, underdog, etc are meaningless. The only question is whether they are lawful. Everything else is left to the consumer.
By the way, Zynga usually beats their competitors because in the long run their clones are better than the originals. Like it or not, but thats innovation.
edited for civility :)
I think cross-advertising through their other games to their massive existing user base has much more to do with it.
Nonsense. Zynga just used it's position and money to better advertise, brand, & connect their games together using facebook as a marketing channel. MS did the same thing with Internet Explorer. IE had the highest market share all these years NOT because it was better than Netscape, Firefox, & Opera. But because MS used their position, money, and installed base. Once at the top, a monopoly is hard to overthrow.
But, if we're supposed to be pulling for the little guy, then we should be supporting Apple against Samsung right? Samsung makes over twice Apple's yearly revenue. The blatant copying by Samsung of Apple (even down to icon colors and packaging design) is just as obvious as Zynga's ripoff.
I honestly can't believe you that you think this could possibly be true. Then again, Apple fans can get pretty overzealous.
Why do you think we all flocked to Google and give it a chance back in early days of Lycos, Yahoo, MS, & AltaVista? It wasn't because we were educated about its new "page rank" algorithm. It was the story behind the company. The same thing that led us towards Facebook and Craigslist. It's NOT the only factor in using a service, the service has to be good obviously and provide something the others don't. But there are endless cases where being better doesn't bring home the bacon. It's the human element, the emotional factor that can win people over and get them to give you a try.
"Little guy" is simply a way of saying "ability to have empathy for". When a company is vulnerable, non aggressive, new, innocent, we tend to see them as something pure and beautiful that must be protected from a brutal world. like a flower. Cheesy I know, but it works.
At some fundamental level you either think that competition "should" involve innovation and/or original design in order to incentivise peopel to create original products, or you think that cloning look and feel is part of the market operating efficiently without artifical barriers.
The Apple vs. Android holy war spans many different devices, user interfaces, brands, packaging methods, and advertisements. Some Android phones copy the iPhone/iOS more than others. For example, I feel that the Galaxy S1 absolutely tries to copy many key aspects of iPhone and iOS, down to the device appearance, UI appearance, packaging, and marketing (in terms of visuals). However, I don't feel that many other phones (such as the Galaxy Nexus) resemble the iPhone to the amount that Apple wishes it did.
In contrast to that situation, this EA vs. Zynga battle is over one specific product, with defined features and aesthetics.
Except this is totally false since Samsung had black slab designs since 2006.
One caveat - Samsung clearly copied the phone icon (although this was obviously taken from the keypad of existing mobile phones), packaging and connector from Apple. This is more obvious, but -FAR- less significant to the product than what Apple "borrowed" from Sony/Jony.
Copying the many trivial details of a game down to specific color values is not the same thing as sharing a gross physical resemblance to a piece of glass with metal on the back and a screen with a grid of icons.
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[1]http://investor.zynga.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=686775
The Ville has identical behavior to The Sims Social, and strikingly similar artwork.
Good thing you're not a lawyer.
Ferguson v National Broadcasting Co:
If the two works are so strikingly similar as to preclude the possibility of independent creation, 'copying' may be proved without a showing of access