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EA levels copyright lawsuit against Zynga | 189 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
EA levels copyright lawsuit against Zynga
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 05 2012 @ 02:51 AM EDT
They may well have copied something here, but this could set some very dangerous
precedents.

A LOT of games share substantial similarities. And after that recent mess of a
Tetris lawsuit, wherein the court seemingly made arbitrary decisions about what
was and was not protectable, it could create some dangerous precedent.

It's weird because we have a "scenes a faire" notion in fair use, but
the courts appear to be in denial about how those scenes come to be.

That said, I'm totally fine with Zygna losing, so long as it doesn't create
trouble for other game devs or start a bad trend. But I fear that there are
possibilities for LOTS of unlikely coincidences between any two large works,
just as it's possible for the same words and phrases to appear in two large
novels.

It may well be that Zygna copied some stupid stuff, like the RBG values of the
skin tones. But even there, we can't necessarily be sure that they didn't both
get those from some common source. I may be wrong about that one, but it's
worth investigating at least.

And even if they're wrong, I'd hate to live in a world where Dragon Warrior was
the only RPG, Tiny Computer People preempted both the Sims and Ville, or Pong
somehow owned the idea of games themselves.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

EA levels copyright lawsuit against Zynga
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 05 2012 @ 03:35 AM EDT
As a game developer, I do not applaud what Zynga do, but what EA is levelling
against them sounds dangerous for all game developers. If one can go to court
over non-literal copying in games, it would make it too easy for those with
legal resources to bully competitors (or even perceived competitors) with less
resources out of business. Reminds me of what Blizzard (now Activision Blizzard)
had done a few years back.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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