wraggster
June 21st, 2012, 22:47
An app developer has been found guilty of infringing copyright in a mobile game that adhered a little too closely to the design and mechanics of Tetris.
It's tempting to see the ruling, by a federal court in New Jersey, as the first significant breakthrough in the fight against videogame cloning (http://www.edge-online.com/search?searchTerm=cloning). The defendant, Xio Interactive, raised no issue of fact in reponse to the charges, admitting that it chose to allocate its financial resources not to development of an original game, but the study of copyright law so it could rip off an existing one.
The resulting work, Mino, is no longer available from the App Store, but as the video below shows, the similarities aren't too hard to spot.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/tetris-case-encouraging-cloning-not-dead-yet
It's tempting to see the ruling, by a federal court in New Jersey, as the first significant breakthrough in the fight against videogame cloning (http://www.edge-online.com/search?searchTerm=cloning). The defendant, Xio Interactive, raised no issue of fact in reponse to the charges, admitting that it chose to allocate its financial resources not to development of an original game, but the study of copyright law so it could rip off an existing one.
The resulting work, Mino, is no longer available from the App Store, but as the video below shows, the similarities aren't too hard to spot.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/tetris-case-encouraging-cloning-not-dead-yet