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Comment by dusing | Hacker News Reader

From the complaint "As demonstrated in the chart below, The Ville uses the same precise RGB values for its skin tones as does The Sims Social. There is aninfinitesimally small chance that the use of the same RGB values for skin tone in The Ville as TheSims Social is mere coincidence."

Zynga could have at least tried not to make the copying so obvious.

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The key argument in the complaint:

"Not only does The Ville blatantly mimic the entire framework and style of gameplay in The Sims Social, but it so closely copies the original, creative expression and unique elements of The Sims Social — i.e., the animation sequences, visual arrangements, characters’ motions andactions, and other unique audio-visual elements — that the two games are nearly indistinguishable."

The pages marked 17-34 in the complaint contain a number of screenshots demonstrating just to what degree the "original, creative expression" was copied. Specific colors, proportions, and even action sequences appear to be nearly identical. This is most definitely not coincidence, and (as the complaint notes on page 9-12) is common practice for Zynga.

If you're having trouble finding the actual complaint (as I was) here it is: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101954002/EA-v-Zynga-Complaint-Fin...

There's also the bit about hiring of EA executives (John Schappert, Jeff Karp, Barry Cottle) who had access to The Sims Social and social IP (pages 13-14).

Just a query: How similar is this to the 9 lines of code in the Oracle vs Google situation?

well, rgb is 16777216 colors. Lets say not all of those are acceptable skin tones, but there's a broad spectrum that's allow. for the sake of argument, lets go with a million. Not to be crazy racist, black white brown red and yellow are all adjectives used to describe skin color. skin color is a big slice of the color spectrum.

so, out of a million colors pick 8. what are the odds i pick the same 8? (if you don't remember combinatorics, a million choose 8 is on the order of 10^40).

Even if you dispute the full million colors are available, restricting our choice to just 100 unique skin colors, choosing 8 is over a hundred trillion combinations.

I'd say the odds of you and i picking the same 8 colors are pretty darn small.

And this is of course ignoring the decision to go with 8, not any other reasonable number, different colors in the first place. ;)

Are you asking about the API vs expressive elements?

What's wrong with copying skin-tone? It's a good color.

The issue is that Zynga copied the precise RGB value. Given the large number of possible RGB values for skin, it's beyond suspicious that they wound up with the same value.

It's a SINGLE COLOR!

Well, yes, so what? That precise RGB value might be a great color! Good artists copy, great artists steal, etc. It's certainly not enough to warrant legal action. If they stole actual media, that would be different.

This is such a surprising claim that I had to check, and it does not appear to be true.

Copy the image from the complaint into an image editor and look at the RGB values with the color tool. I looked and didn't see a single match.

I'm going to give EA the benefit of the doubt here, and suggest that there is almost certainly additional compression on the images from when it was converted to PDF / uploaded to Scribd.

Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure EA has a fairly competent legal team, and you don't make such a specific claim in a filing unless you're prepared to back it up.

The image is a jpg, which does not always retain true colors (it's a "lossy" format.) Click the same color block in 3 or 4 different places and you'll get different results.

In order to do a true comparison, you'd have to use a color tool directly on the game or on screenshots taken in a lossless format.

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