Re: copyright
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Re: copyright
You cannot copyright ideas.
You can copyright code, and trademark names.
Trademarks only have any legal right whatsoever if the use of the
trademarked name in question by another company is hurting the
commerciality of the trademarked product.
ie:
If I make a big carton box, and put some really cheap parts in it, and call
it an Apple Macintosh, and I sell it, people will think apple macs are
really bad computers.
If I sell an apple on the street, the nature thingie, not the computer,
apple, the company doesn't have any legal rights.
Furthermore, you can never copyright/trademark ideas. The idea of some
little blocks falling down and you have to move them so that they form
lines, which then go away, is an idea, and anybody can write source for
that. porting or disassembling the original tetris source is infringement
of copyright though.
I doubt you are walking over trademark too much by calling things Z-tetris.
Especially since 'tetris' tends to be the name associated with the idea.
just like sidways shoot-em-up is the common name for all those many, many
games out there. tetris happends to be the actual name of the product,
which does give the company holding the trademark (elorg) some rights. I
really sincerely doubt they will complain about completely non-commercial
use of the name, as is the case with ti85.
--
-R.Zwitserloot@BTInternet.com
Nick Zitzmann <nickzman@ESKIMO.COM> wrote in article
<AFEDC286-966D7@204.122.16.186>...
> On Sat, Jul 12, 1997 4:47 AM, Nadler <mailto:sn11162@CEDARNET.ORG> wrote:
> > Can you make a game for a calc using a copyrighted name like Tetris? I
> > am assuming that Tetris was copyrighted. When a calculator game says
> > that it is copyrighted is it really copyrighted or did the author just
> > write it on there?
>
> Yes and no. Tetris (as a name and an idea) is trademarked and Copyright
> 1987, Elorg. (which is an abbreviation for Tetris's original publisher,
> whose name is untypably long.) I believe commercial releases of Tetris
must
> come from a group which has officially licensed the game. They're
probably
> not going to hunt down people who make not-so-widely (read:
> non-commercially) distributed versions of their game, though.
>
> Besides that, I don't believe any of these Tetris game authors have put
> their name down as the copyright name for "Tetris", just their own code
> rendition of the game. That's understandable.
>
> Nick Zitzmann No WWW page at this time.
> (Resident Macintosh Tweaker)
> Windows 95:
> From the people who brought you
> EDLIN!
>
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