 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video games |
| Founder | |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Services | Licensor of the Tetris brand |
| Owner | Tetris Holding, LLC [1] |
| Website | tetris |
The Tetris Company, Inc. (TTC) is the manager and licensor for the Tetris brand to third parties. [2] It is based in Nevada and is owned by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. [3] The company is the exclusive licensee of Tetris Holding LLC, the company that owns Tetris rights worldwide. [4]
Tetris was created in 1985 [5] by Pajitnov. As the initial versions of the game spread through the Eastern Bloc, interest in licensing it for western commercial release drew much attention. Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) was the Soviet agency created to control the import and export of hardware and software outside the Soviet Union. As part of the licensing of the game, Pajitnov agreed to let Elorg handle all licensing for a 10-year period. One of the main licensees of the game was Bullet-Proof Software, owned by Henk Rogers, with whom Pajitnov struck up a friendship. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Elorg was privatized.
The Tetris Company was established in 1996 by Pajitnov and Rogers to manage the worldwide licensing of the property. The visual expression in official Tetris games is covered by copyrights that are owned by Tetris Holding, LLC, the company into which Pajitnov placed his Tetris rights. [6] The Tetris Company licenses the Tetris trademark (which includes Tetris trade dress elements, such as the distinct brightly colored blocks and the vertically rectangular play field [7] ) to video game development companies and maintains a set of guidelines that each licensed game must meet. [2] Initially, Elorg was a partner in the Tetris Company until Rogers and Pajitnov bought Elorg's remaining rights around 2005. [8] [9]
The Tetris Company has also issued licenses to third parties for the production of other products, such as greeting cards and lottery tickets. [6] [10]
TTC drew attention in the late 1990s when it attempted to remove freeware and shareware clones of Tetris from the market by sending out cease-and-desist letters claiming both trademark and copyright infringement. [11] Creators of Tetris clones claimed that the company had no valid legal basis to restrict tetromino games that did not infringe on the Tetris name trademark, since copyright "look-and-feel" suits have not stood up in court in the past ( Lotus v. Borland ), and because the letters made no patent claims. [12]
In August 2008, Apple Inc. removed Tris, a clone of Tetris from its online App Store. [13] In March 2009, the Tetris Company sued BioSocia, operator of the Omgpop gaming portal [14] [15] because one of its multiplayer games, Blockles, was too similar to Tetris. By September 2009, Omgpop removed the game from the website and replaced it with an alternate that the developers created, based on Puyo Puyo .
In May 2010, lawyers representing the Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available for Android. [16] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris. [17] [18] [19]
In February 2011, the Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called "bullying". [20] [21]
In the case Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. , a US District Court judge ruled in June 2012 that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks. [22]
In October 2020, the previous lincensing company for the Tetris brand, Blue Planet Software Inc., founded by Henk Rogers in 1996, was merged with The Tetris Company, effectively rendering BPS defunct. [1]
In April 2021, a YouTuber called JDH made an operating system that only runs Tetris. [23] Two months later, his GitHub repository was taken offline by the Tetris Company because of copyright infringement. [24] [ non-primary source needed ]
In July 2022, the Tetris Company took down Playtris, a Playdate remake of Tetris created by developer ThaCuber, due to copyright infringement. [25] The GitHub repository is still available under the new name, BlockDate. [26]
Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov is a Russian computer engineer and video game designer who is best known for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Tetris is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s. After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, the rights reverted to Pajitnov in 1996, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.
Henk Brouwer Rogers is a Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur of partial Indo descent. He is known for producing Japan's first major turn-based role-playing video game The Black Onyx, securing the rights to distribute the Russian puzzle video game Tetris on video game consoles where the game found popularity, and as the founder of Bullet-Proof Software and The Tetris Company, which licenses the Tetris trademark. He was instrumental in resolving licensing disputes that brought Tetris to the Game Boy. Today, he is managing director of The Tetris Company.
Tetris is a puzzle game developed by Atari Games and originally released for arcades in 1988. Based on Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, Atari Games' version features the same gameplay as the computer editions of the game, as players must stack differently shaped falling blocks to form and eliminate horizontal lines from the playing field. The game features several difficulty levels and two-player simultaneous play.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
Stern Electronics Inc. v. Kaufman, 669 F.2d 852, is a legal case in which the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit held that Omni Video Games violated the copyright and trademark of Scramble, an arcade game marketed by Stern Electronics. The lawsuit was due to a trend of "knock-off" video games in the early 1980s, leading to one of the earliest findings of copyright infringement for a video game, and the first federal appellate court to recognize a video game as a copyrighted audiovisual work.
Elektronorgtechnica, better known abbreviated as ELORG (Элорг), was a state-owned organization with a monopoly on the import and export of computer support and hardware and software in the Soviet Union. It was controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the USSR from 1971 to 1989.
Tetris is a puzzle video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1989. It is a portable version of Alexey Pajitnov's original Tetris and it was bundled with the North American and European releases of the Game Boy itself. It is the first game to have been compatible with the Game Link Cable, a pack-in accessory that allows two Game Boy consoles to link for multiplayer purposes. A remaster, Tetris DX, was released on the Game Boy Color in 1998. A Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console version of Tetris was released in December 2011, lacking multiplayer functionality. The game was released on the Nintendo Switch Online service in February 2023.
Blue Planet Software Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher founded by Henk Rogers in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1996. The company was founded as the successor to Bullet-Proof Software Inc., founded in 1983 by Rogers in Japan, which closed on 22 February of 2001.
Tetris Online, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher. The company was the exclusive online licensee of Tetris in North America and Europe. It was founded in January 2006 by Nintendo of America founder and former president Minoru Arakawa, video game designer and publisher Henk Rogers and Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. Tetris Online, Inc. is the developer of social games Tetris Battle and Tetris Friends. In March 2013, Tetris Online, Inc. laid off 40% of its staff.
Avatar Reality is a Honolulu-based game studio founded by Henk B. Rogers and Kazuyuki Hashimoto in December 2006. They develop an advanced virtual realm platform aimed at bringing together individuals worldwide on a grandiose level. Rogers with Alexy Pajitnov is known for creating Tetris and introducing it to the world and especially to US markets, and Kazuyuki is best known for developing the game Final Fantasy VII and the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Avatar Reality is one of FiReStarter companies at the 2009 Future In Review Conference. Minoru Arakawa, former CEO of Nintendo of America, is an advisor to the company. The company is led by CEO Jim Sink.
Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc. 862 F.2d 204, 9 U.S.P.Q.2d (BNA) 1322 was a court case between two video game manufacturers, where Data East claimed that their copyright in Karate Champ was infringed by World Karate Championship, a game created by Epyx. Data East released Karate Champ in arcades in 1984, and the game became a best-seller and pioneered the fighting game genre. The next year, Epyx published World Karate Championship for home computers, which sold 1.5 million copies. Data East sued Epyx, alleging that the game infringed on their copyright and trademark.
The Ville is a defunct game by Zynga released on June 30, 2012 in which the object was to earn experience points by building a house and talking with neighbors.
Tetris Ultimate is a puzzle video game developed by American studio SoMa Play and published by Ubisoft. Ubisoft partnered with The Tetris Company to develop the game to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Tetris franchise.
The protection of intellectual property (IP) of video games through copyright, patents, and trademarks, shares similar issues with the copyrightability of software as a relatively new area of IP law. The video game industry itself is built on the nature of reusing game concepts from prior games to create new gameplay styles but bounded by illegally direct cloning of existing games, and has made defining intellectual property protections difficult since it is not a fixed medium.
Tetris is a 2023 biographical thriller film based on true events around the race to license and patent the video game Tetris from Russia in the late 1980s during the Cold War. It was directed by Jon S. Baird and written by Noah Pink. The film stars Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Sofia Lebedeva, and Anthony Boyle.
Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., 863 F.Supp.2d 394, was a 2012 American legal case related to copyright of video games, confirming that a game's look and feel can be protected under copyright law. Tetris Holding is a company that holds the copyright to the original Tetris game from 1985 and licenses those rights to game developers. Xio Interactive is a game developer that released Mino in 2009, a mobile game based on the gameplay of Tetris. Mino was downloaded millions of times, and Tetris Holding filed a DMCA notice and eventually a lawsuit against Xio for copyright infringement.
Capcom U.S.A. Inc. v. Data East Corp., 1994 WL 1751482 was a 1994 legal case related to the copyright of video games, where Capcom alleged that Data East's game Fighter's History infringed the copyright of Capcom's game Street Fighter II. It was revealed that the design documents for Fighter's History contained several references to Street Fighter II, leading Capcom to sue Data East for damages, as well as a preliminary injunction to stop the distribution of the infringing game. In spite of the intentional similarities between the two games, the court concluded that Data East did not infringe upon Capcom's copyright, as most of these similarities were not protected under copyright. Judge William H. Orrick Jr. applied a legal principle known as the merger doctrine, where courts will not grant copyright protection where it would effectively give someone a monopoly over an idea.
Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps, Inc., No. 2:12-cv-00147, was a court case between two video game developers, where Spry Fox alleged that the game Yeti Town, developed by 6waves Lolapps, infringed on their copyrighted game Triple Town. While the case was settled out of court, preliminary opinions by Judge Richard A. Jones affirmed that a video game's "look and feel" may be protected by copyright, affirming the federal district court decision in Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. from earlier the same year.
Atari Inc. v. Amusement World Inc., 547 F.Supp. 222 is a legal case in which the United States District Court for the District of Maryland held that Amusement World's arcade game Meteors did not violate Atari's copyright in their game Asteroids.
