On 5/3/2011 11:15, Warp wrote:
>    The look and feel of a product can be trademarked (tradedress). It does
> not fall under copyright.

In the USA, it certainly did before the DMCA. I don't know about nowadays. 
The whole Apple vs Microsoft think was a look-and-feel copyright suit. Note 
that the original look-and-feel suit that got to the supreme court here was 
over greeting cards. The one guy did a bunch of focus groups and such to 
decide what greeting cards to make. The other guy wandered thru the stores, 
looked at the competitors, and told his artists to come up with similar 
cards. (One of the judges who disagreed with the ruling thought it was a bad 
idea to allow for uncopyrightable phrases like "I love you" combined with 
original art to still be subject to someone else's copyright.)

>    Look and feel is not about game mechanics, the way a game works and how
> it's played. It's how it looks.

Possibly.

>    If you make a game that looks like, for example, a Barbie game (including
> color schemes, fonts, character design...), the company that owns the
> tradedress rights can sue you even if you never use the name "Barbie" or
> any of the other trademarked names of the franchise.

This is true.

> However, they cannot
> sue you from copying the game mechanics of one of their games, if you use
> your own original graphics, sounds and code.

I'm not sure this is true everywhere.

>    A puzzle piece consisting of four squares is not distinctive enough to
> be considered tradedressing, even assuming tetris was tradedressed (which
> it isn't).
>
>> I'm not sure this is talking about video games, given the rest of the
>> paragraph. It makes much more sense if you read it in terms of something
>> like board games.
>
>    And why would it make any difference, exactly?

Because you're trying to apply engineering logic to the legal system. That 
isn't how it works. :-)

I'm just saying that what you can copyright on (say) a monopoly game board 
is probably easier to duplicate without violating copyright than what you 
can copyright in a video game. In monopoly, I can't copyright the layout of 
the squares or the rules. I can copyright what the squares say, the text of 
the rules, possibly the colors and their arrangements on the board. But 
those are easy to change without affecting the play of the game.

It's much harder to imagine you've copyrighted the look and feel of tetris 
but I can still make a tetris game. Basically, there isn't a whole lot I can 
change and still have the same tetris. The pieces still have to be the same 
shape, to fall and rotate, to disappear when they make a line.

Bejeweled might be sort of intermediate. What if they're not jewels? What if 
I change the gameplay to make different power-ups? These are all the sorts 
of things judges would decide, methinks.

One could easily argue, methinks, that the actual real-time interaction of a 
game is part of the "look and feel" of a video game, when it isn't part of 
the "look and feel" of a board game.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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