Video game clone
As game production shifted to software on discs and cartridges, Atari sued Philips under copyright law, allowing them to shut down several clones of Pac-Man.
Developers can copyright the graphics, title, story, and characters, but have more difficulty protecting software design and game mechanics.
For example, Grand Theft Auto III spurred a number of games that have been called GTA clones but which are not direct copies of assets or mechanical ideas.
Atari's Nolan Bushnell called these vendors "jackals", but took no legal action and instead focused on making new games to try to outpace them.
The case was settled out of court in 1974 for undisclosed terms, believed due to factors relating to a short downturn in the market, as David Braun, the CEO of Allied Leisure had said in 1974 that "th[e] video game is yesterday's newspaper".
The settlement was also likely due to pressure from the patent issues that had arisen around the home versions of Pong in the first generation of consoles that were occurring simultaneously.
In 1974, Magnavox sued several companies on patent infringement for creating and distributing table-tennis arcade games including Atari and Midway.
Atari settled in 1976 and agreed to pay Magnavox US$1,500,000 for a perpetual license to the three patents and other technology sharing agreements, allowing them to continue to release their home version of Pong.
The ZX Spectrum had been released in the United Kingdom in 1982 and its low cost compared to other home computers helped give birth to the video game sector in the UK as well as Western Europe.
The system could not be imported into the Eastern bloc countries, but enterprising companies found ways to clone the ZX Spectrum hardware at even lower cost.
[20] The degree of cloning was so great that in 1981, Atari warned in full-page advertisements "Piracy: This Game is Over", stating that the company "will protect its rights by vigorously enforcing [its] copyrights and by taking appropriate action against unauthorized entities who reproduce or adapt substantial copies of ATARI games", like a home-computer clone.
[51] Courts later barred other clones of Pac-Man, including Packri-Monster by Bandai, Puckman by Artic International, and another similar game called Mighty Mouth.
[49] Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests that the ruling had a chilling effect on competition for Pac-Man, despite the court stating that copyright did not control the idea of a maze-chase game.
[52] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1984 that "Atari bought itself about a million dollars worth of unfavorable publicity by bullying some very nice teen-aged programmers; surely they could have been smoother about it".
[55] By the late 1980s, courts began to take a more permissive approach with video game clones, deciding that many elements of creativity cannot be protected, such as generic concepts, functional rules, and scènes à faire.
[63] Data East used the argument that had previously been used to thwart their 1988 lawsuit against Epyx, that none of the elements that were similar to Capcom's Street Fighter were protectable under copyright.
[64] Capcom U.S.A. lost the case on grounds that the copied elements were excluded from copyright protection, as generic scènes à faire.
[65] The case was one of several that made it difficult for a copyright holder to win a lawsuit against an alleged clone,[66] and also allowed game genres to develop based on imitation and iteration.
[67][68][69] With the costs of filing a lawsuit being very high compared to the expected outcome, many video game copyright holders became hesitant to sue alleged clones.
This allows the teams and users to expand upon original elements of the commercial game, such as software bugs that were not fixed, improving gameplay concepts, support for different and newer computers or console platforms, or adding new ideas to the base gameplay principles, as well as easing game extensions through user-created mods or add-ons.
[92] According to Brian Reynolds, the former lead gameplay designer at Zynga, the company sees potential new genres and game ideas that gain popularity, and then strive to add their own innovation and concepts to at, so that "[their] goal is to have the highest-quality thing".
[95] The game Mino featured the same approach of using falling tetromino blocks to form complete lines on a playfield and score points.
[98] Legal and industry experts agreed this signalled that United States courts were becoming more willing to grant broader video games for specific visual arrangements.
The case was subsequently settled out of court, with Spry Fox gaining ownership of the Yeti Town property by the end of 2012.
[107][108] While 2048 had been originally published freely and under an open-source license, Ketchapp developed an ad-supported version of 2048 that charted on the App Store.
[115] Video game clones are generally difficult to prevent through intellectual property laws such as copyright, patents, or trademarks.
[118][119][120] Wired compared a history of these rulings both for and against infringement, and described the idea-expression distinction – that copyright law won't protect an idea, only its expression – as "simple to state" but "difficult to apply".
[51] Patents have been used in a limited fashion to protect novel gameplay ideas, such as the navigation system in Sega's Crazy Taxi games.
Sega sued Fox Interactive for patent infringement for their use of a similar system in The Simpsons: Road Rage, a case that was ultimately settled out of court.
[123][124] Apple has released a tool to streamline claims of app clones to a team dedicated to handle these cases, helping to bring the two parties together to try to negotiate prior to action.
