Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc.

Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., 863 F.Supp.2d 394 (D.N.J. 2012), 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. The earliest video game case law had protected the designs in Galaxian and Pac-Man. But later cases such as Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc. found that it is permissible to make a video game clone with similar ideas and principles as another game, since copyright does not protect an idea, only the specific expression of that idea. A trial occurred in 2012, the first case in a long time to proceed to trial on this issue. The district court ruled for Tetris Holding, with Judge Wolfson applying the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test to determine if any infringement occurred. Although standard gameplay ideas are not copyrightable, Mino was still substantially similar to Tetris in terms of its art style, and those elements are in fact protected by copyright. This case has since been applied in other copyright disputes to offer broader protection to the look and feel of video games. In 1985, Alexey Pajitnov created the puzzle game Tetris for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Within a few years Tetris became one of the most successful video games of all time. Henk Rogers was one of the key people who brought Tetris to the world by going to Moscow to negotiate for the rights. Rogers later befriended Pajitnov and helped the two acquire ownership of the copyrights from a former Soviet agency.