Subject: [stella] Tetris copyright?!!! From: Schwerin <schwerin@xxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 01:58:11 -0500 |
I followed some of the links from the original post. In particular I found answers, or at least something to think about, in regards to the original authorship, and to the copyright question. Here is one posted by tetris.com about the history of the game. http://www.tetris.com/FR_BOs.html A (large) snippet: Tetris creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was inspired to become a mathematician by a lifelong love of puzzles. In 1985, Pajitnov was a specialist in computer sciences at the Computer Center of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. While at the Computer Center (also known as AcademySoft), Alexey still played with puzzles, but in a far different context. While working as a programmer in the field of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, Pajitov often programmed games as simple tasks to test new equipment. On this occasion, he chose the traditional puzzle Pentomino which required placement of 12 different-shaped pieces formed out of five squares to be arranged in a certain order in a box. Pajitnov remembers the moment he knew he had a hit game. "When I wrote the program for rotation of pieces and I saw how it worked, poomph! I knew it would be great in real time," he reminisces. He also realized the 12-5 combination was too much for real time, so he reduced the program to seven shapes of four square blocks. Thus the name Tetris, taken from tetra, the Greek word for "four." It took him only two weeks to program the prototype. Pajitnov, however, was programming on an old Russian computer without graphics, in Pascal. While his colleagues were rabid about the game, Pajitnov realized he would reach a wider audience if the game could be converted to run on the IBM PC. Since he had little experience with the Western machine, he enlisted the help of his friend, Vadim Gerasimov, a 16 year old "hacker" ; who mastered the PC in a month. Soon after, a PC version of Tetris was introduced and spread like wildfire throughout Moscow. Pajitnov recalls , "At that time there was no software market in Russia, only the distribution of unauthorized copies. Within weeks, the game was being played on every PC in Moscow!" It took much longer for Tetris to arrive in America. A Hungarian programming consortium, via their London agent, Andromeda Software Ltd., sold the U.S. Tetris PC rights to Spectrum Holobyte in Alameda, California. For Tetris, Spectrum added rich, color graphics and music based on traditional Russian themes. At the 1989 Software Publishers Association Awards, the "Oscars" for the software industry, Tetris set records when it won an unprecedented four Excellence in Software Awards. <snip> The man responsible for heading to Russia and tracking down Alexey Pajitnov and the console system rights to Tetris was entrepreneur Henk Rogers. <snip> While Tetris made Pajitnov a sort of folk hero, the phenomenally successful game did not make him rich. The royalties for the original Tetris went to the Academy and the Soviet Ministry of Commerce. Comments Pajitnov, "I said, if you can't give me money, that's OK. Just help to get this game to the West. And they did." In 1996, with the help of entrepreneur Henk Rogers, The Tetris Company, LLC. was organized. Under this new structure, Alexey would now receive a royalty on sales of all Tetris products. It seems the original author had a lean towards an open software philosophy (at least from what I read here), but perhaps that is because there was no other means to distribute his program at that time. I also think it's good that he's getting paid for his work (if above is truthful). As for the claim of copyright "look and feel" infringement, http://www.computerlaw.com/lookfeel.html this article, which is pointed to by the anti-tetris corp site, goes over lots of cases and decisions. Lotus vs Borland Apple vs Microsoft Atari (PAC-MAN) vs Philips ("K. C. Munchkin.") Broderbund (Print Shop) vs Unison World Data East USA vs Epyx (Karate video game) I'm not a lawyer, but the message in some of those decisions seems to me to be "If you're going to compete with an existing product, and you remake it with the same functionality, and the same decisions about things that could be arbitrary (like menu organization), that's infringement. If however, you do MORE, go the extra mile, and be expressive of an original idea beyond the inspiration, that pushes it further from infringement" The analogy here is, How Do you write the world's Second spreadsheet, word processor, karate game... -Andrew Schwerin -- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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