From: Christopher Woods <christof_at_infinitus.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:13:16 +0100

I would agree also.

I quote the US Copyright office (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html),

-----

The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the
name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.

Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in
literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to
any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the
development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made
public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another
game based on similar principles.

Some material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright
if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For
example, the text matter describing the rules of the game, or the pictorial
matter appearing on the gameboard or container, may be registrable.

-----

Imho, PopCap Games are once again trying to push their luck. They don't
pester any of the other sites on the web that have Bejeweled clones (and
sometimes, make a fair bit of money out of it, if it's an online gambling or
'skills-based' gameplay site).


-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Stenberg [mailto:daniel_at_rockbox.org]
Sent: 15 April 2006 16:36
To: Rockbox development
Subject: Re: Fwd: Remove PluginJewels from RockBox downloads immediately

On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Tomas Salfischberger wrote:

> You can ask him to contact someone by phone, and explain his problem,
> just to make sure he understands what we do etc. I think Daniel or
> Linus would be a good choise for that phonecall, or some native
> English speaker with legal knowledge. (Do we have a lawyer in the
> house? :-))

I would say that a fair and just response would be to kindly ask the
person/company in what way we could possibly violate their copyright. We use
no fragments of their product, and me knowingly they have no patent on the
ideas (for those areas of the world where software patents would be valid).

I think this is just an attempt to make us stop shipping Jewels, but without
much legal backup.

--
  Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/

Received on 2006-04-15