Takedown Letters For WP7 Tetris Clones

karios writes "Today I received a takedown letter from a law firm representing the Tetris Company for copyright violations involving my game Tetrada, which I published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The witch hunt, after hitting Android, iOS and other platforms, continues on Windows Phone 7. It's a pity, since some of the tetromino games in the Marketplace were pretty decent."

newbie error

[clickclickdrone]

Clearly a newbie. The game industry is littered with people being sued for selling clones right back to pacman and earlier. Didn't you do any research before doing this? Not exactly a great advert for your thoroughness and professionalism and now you've announced it to the world to prove the point.

WP7

[stiller]

Word Perfect 7? WordPress 7? Oh. Windows Phone 7. I'll file that one under irrelevant.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when game rules are copyrightable?

This is not the word you're looking for *hand wave*
This is a pretty clear trademark issue.

Even if it wasn't a trademark issue, just going to the tetris Wiki page reveals it to be "owned" by a very litigious company [wikipedia.org].

I'm starting to wonder if the people making these clones have a business plan which goes something like this:
1) Copy someone's "here's how to make tetris" sample code (there's countless samples out there)
2) Post the game to the latest appstore
3) Wait for takedown notice
4) Put up a "donation" page to "provide for legal defense"
5) Whine about takedown notice too all the geek-friendly websites
6) Profit!