Tetris clone “Quinn” comes under fire
Posted by inpheaux on July 10th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Oh, Tetris. Why does such a wonderful game have to have such horrible litigious maintainers? For anyone unaware of the bizarre twisted past of Tetris, go read the short history on Wikipedia. Effectively, the rights to the game have changed hands roughly 800 times, thanks to being developed in the Soviet Union, and being such a good game that everyone and their dog wanted exclusive rights to it.
The state we're in right now is that there's "The Tetris Company", the sole owner of the rights to using the name "Tetris". The Tetris Company thinks they have a copyright on the actual game concept, and thus feels that if you want to make a Tetris clone, even if you don't use the name "Tetris" anywhere, it's their job to sue you for copyright infringement. But here's the problem: U.S. Copyright law says otherwise. Copyright law exists to protect the actual work, not the ideas or concepts contained therein. This means individual games can be copyrighted, but the gameplay mechanics cannot. This is how companies like PopCap can get away with ripping off the core concepts behind PuzzLoop (aka Magnetica) to make Zuma or Magical Drop to make AstroPop. Copyright Law says that's perfectly cool even if it doesn't seem fair.
So what the hell is Quinn? Quinn is a little indie multiplayer Tetris clone for OSX, similar to Blocktrix, but without all the powerups. Oh and they've been hit with a Cease & Desist order from The Tetris Company. The C&D has two main complaints:
1) They called Quinn "A Tetris game for Mac OSX". This they might have some level of ground on, since The Tetris Company is allowed to bitch at people for representing a game as "Tetris" if the licensing fee hasn't been paid. But whoops, the guys behind Quinn have already fixed that.
2) Quinn is a Tetris clone, and this makes The Tetris Company mad because they think they have a copyright on the game.
. . . But as I've covered, they don't. Look at the second paragraph on the second page of the C&D Letter. They basically listed off everything that makes Tetris Tetris. So according to their crazy demands, every Tetris clone ever is illegal and mean and needs to be removed. Hopefully the Quinn developers will be able to put up a legal defense, since it would suck for such a great game to dry up and blow away due to corporate bullying.
Then again, The Tetris Company's lawyers forgot to send out C&D's to common mirrors, so it's not gone yet. Hopefully this will all get resolved soon enough, and development can resume.
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