right now microsoft has had minetest removed from the google play store for a month using groundless copyright accusations
If I were the creator, I'd change the name before I'm forced to.
If you copy the entire essence but still write the code yourself, is that not infringement?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_dist...
Game mechanics pretty much can't be copyrighted at all.
The developers of shadow of war has a patent on their nemesis system. It's not just an implementation detail, it's the entire concept.
https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-...
>The patent protects the "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games."
>This encompasses a hierarchy of procedurally-generated NPCs that interact with and remember the player's actions. The patent also covers changes to the NPCs' positions in the hierarchy, as well as their appearance and behaviour, again based on the actions of the player.
but yeah software patents are a huge problem
fortunately we don't have to worry about them in this case
The concept of Tetris, in particular, is protected with copyright, patent, and trademark armor so thick that if you write a clone of the game, Henk and Alexey will sue you into a smouldering crater.
you've been able to buy cheap '9999 in 1 block game' hardware with 200 nematic pixels, preprogrammed with tetris, for at least 15 years at any import port in the world
i've written two tetris clones myself, http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/inexorable-misc/tetris and https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/tetris.c, and no lawsuits have yet arrived
also, minecraft is just an infiniminer clone, and there are fifty zillion clones of each of pacman, space invaders, breakout, snake, doom, and super mario
so these novel legal precedents you mention, though indeed menacing, are at least still being very narrowly applied in practice; conflicting precedents include data east v. epyx, capcom v. data east, and atari v. amusement world
even in tetris v. xio, the judge held that tetris's gameplay is not copyrightable, and the case was not appealed, so it isn't binding precedent outside that one district
also your mention of patent suggests that maybe you're not very well informed about the area; tetris came out in 01985, so any patents on inventions disclosed by the game would have had to have an application date no later than 01986 (01985 outside the usa) and, barring lemelson-style submarine patent tricks to delay issuance until 02006 or later, be expired for over a decade now
In my personal opinion, as USA has politically appointed judiciary it's hard to see copyright domain extension - eg to game mechanics - as anything other than overreach to use international treaties to protect USA business interests?