The Tetris Company, LLC has recently taken legal action against social games portal, OMGPOP; claiming they are infringing on the intellectual property rights of their works.

Tetris Holding and The Tetris Company sued Biosocia, the owner of games portal site OMGPOP and Charles Forman (founder of the company) over the the game Blockles; claiming it infringes numerous property rights of the most famous Russian blocks in video game history.

Outlined in the lawsuit, the most notable claim of infringement is the copyright of the visual games display and the Tetris trade dress (overall appearance). There’s apparently no allegation relating to the source code being copied, instead, the claims focus on the similarities of the graphical presentations and the styles of game-play.

Jed Spencer (Ober\Kaler attorney) notes that the “idea” of falling blocks cannot be protected under copyright law, but the “expression” of that idea can be.
Even a “simple” game like Tetris will have multiple separately-protected layers of copyright protection. Typically, these will be the actual lines of the source code, characters, video clips, sounds and artwork.

The elements that Tetris has detailed as their distinctive trade dress are…

• Geometric playing pieces formed by four equally-sized, delineated blocks
• The long vertical rectangle playing field, which is higher than wide
• The downward, lateral and rotating movements of the playing pieces
• The appearance of a shadow piece at the bottom of the playing field matrix to indicate where the Tetrimino will drop
• The appearance of a trailer effect after the Tetrimino during a ‘hard drop’ command
• The display of the next Tetrimino that will fall down the matrix in a small box next to the playing field
• The disappearance of any completed horizontal line
• The display of a flash effect when a completed horizontal line disappears
• The subsequent consolidation of the playing pieces remaining on the playing field as a result of the downward shift into the space vacated by the disappearing line

As you can see, any one of these features on their own is very unlikely to convince any Court, but the Tetris owners are hoping that when you take them all into account, it should be clear that Blockles is a blatant copy of Tetris.

The claims outlined in the lawsuit and the screenshot comparisons on the Gamasutra website leaves only one opinion, really. What do you think of all this?

Exclusive: Tetris’ Legal Clone War Versus Blockles [Gamasutra]