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It's tough. I was at a place where another company ripped off our stuff, including our typos, and our lawyer could really only get them to FOAD after we got the patents issued. And at that point they merely exited the market -- no damages.

I should note that we didn't pour 100% of available resources into suing those assholes as a business decision, because we were busy developing our own software.

> It's tough. I was at a place where another company ripped off our stuff, including our typos

We had a customer who complained, off-hand, that a Chinese company had ripped off their (carrier-grade) router design down to the English silk screening on the PCB's.

Reminds me of the "Khyber pass copies" of ancient British firearms that still float around Afghanistan/Pakistan: http://www.martinihenry.com/khyberpage.html

> The makers even tried to copy the stampings and markings from their original source Martini. Backwards letters and misspellings of the markings are common. The majority of Khyber Pass Martinis I've seen have typos that are very similar. One of the most common is to have the "N" in "Enfield" backwards...likely because one "Master Copy" of an original Martini was made, then passed around for others to makes copies from. The erroneous marking was then faithfully copied from one weapon to the next.

Wow. I had heard that many Chinese factories will use retired molds for casting processes and the like to create copies of things like golf clubs, but this brings the whole process to an entirely new level.

The retired mold bit happens quite a lot with carbon fiber bicycle frames. A couple companies have gotten quite upset with Chinese manufacturers in the past.

Secondary message: "We pulled this game before Namco found it thanks to the extra publicity"

One problem is that you can't really copyright game mechanics, at least in the United States. Games are still protected by IP laws in many ways but it's pretty easy to write a direct clone from scratch without infringing anything.

> One problem is that you can't really copyright game mechanics

You can actually patent them[1]:

  A patent was granted to Wizards of the Coast in 1997 for "a novel method
  of game play and game components that in one embodiment are in the
  form of trading cards" that includes claims covering games whose rules
  include many of Magic's elements in combination, including concepts such
  as changing orientation of a game component to indicate use (referred to
  in the Magic and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle rules as "tapping") and
  constructing a deck by selecting cards from a larger pool.[9] The patent
  has aroused criticism from some observers, who believe some of its
  claims to be invalid.[10] In 2003, the patent was an element of a larger
  legal dispute between Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo, regarding trade
  secrets related to Nintendo's Pokémon Trading Card Game. The legal
  action was settled out of court, and its terms were not disclosed.[11]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering#History

There was a period of time when the tap mechanic was used by nearly every collectible card game but they all had their own name for it. The mechanic was the same (rotating the card slightly to show it had been used that turn) which I would have thought was what a patent protected against, rather than protecting the name which would have been copyright.

Tell that to Tetris Company. Their only job is trolling people making tetris-like games.

So.. are they saying that Candy Crush is an original concept in some way?

"King does not clone games"

Put Papa Pear Saga next to Peggle and say that with a straight face.