Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc.
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.
Comparison of Tetris (left) and Mino in Judge Wolfson's analysis, illustrating that the two games put side by side were nearly indistinguishable
Intellectual property protection of video games
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.
The Tetris Company won its case against Xio Interactive, on the basis that Xio's game Mino (right) copied too much of the look-and-feel of Tetris (left).
Sega patented the core gameplay mechanics of games like Crazy Taxi to prevent cloning.
