[stella] Tetris copyright?!!!

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/

Current Thread