A Game of Clones: Video Game Litigation Illustrated

A few weeks ago I was a bit surprised to see an older game of ours posted to HN, in an iOS version. Except we never developed the iOS version because it was never much of a commercial success on PC.

The pirate developer had copied the whole game wholesale, using the assets from the PC version, and presumably hoping to trade on the name recognition of it. He'd done a pretty good job too, it was getting good ratings. I suppose it was making a bit of money from ads and in-app purchases.

I had to remove links from Wikipedia and I used the forms Wordpress and Apple provide for copyright and trademark infringements. He took it down from the app store following that.

Many of my older games have been cloned in gameplay and in almost exact copies of graphics, musics, and title, but this was the first time someone made a pretty legitimate looking port to a different platform.

> Similarly, Mino also displays “garbage” lines, “ghost” pieces, and a preview of the next piece to fall in order to enhance game play as does Tetris…. I am not persuaded that these features constitute either the ideas or rules of Tetris or are necessitated by game play.

Interesting that intuitive controls are typically not copyrightable, yet it sounds like intuitive UI elements are.

Also, it seems the rules for what is copyrightable are very different from what is patentable (see: slide to unlock). If Capcom had patented "method of simulating fighting moves with an 8-way joystick", like it or not, I'm guessing things would have gone very differently.

> The court also filtered out unprotectable game mechanics. Using a six-by-six game grid is not an expressive choice. “A grid that is too small would make the game trivial; a grid that is too large would make it pointless.”

I find this an interesting contrast with the fact that Tetris' tetrominoes are considered expression. As the blog points out, the game would be far too easy with triominoes but far too difficult with pentominoes. I don't know that much about copyright law, but I wonder if that part of the Tetris decision just boils down to the opinion of that particular judge?

I really liked this article. Normally I'd open something say "neat" and close it, as soon as I got bored. For your article, each example of the law in a case by case analysis was interesting and I felt like I was learning things that ran counter to assumptions I'd made over time.

"Games aren't copyrightable" was my previous assumption, but actually it seems to be the case that the reality is more nuanced.

Amazing article! But in response to "Any comments would be great" I would suggest "Rethink the title!" https://www.google.com/search?q="game+of+clones"

Ridiculous Fishing vs Ninja Fishing would be another great example.

The screenshot for Meteors appears to be Meteor computer game for BBC Microcomputer and not the original Meteors arcade game.

Thanks so much for writing this. Sounds cliche but, "I actually learned something!"