Eight years ago I wrote an article called “IP, Morality & The Gaming Industry” where I bemoaned the fact that Intellectual Property don’t adequately protect game creation. Games like Aquarius, Barbarossa, and Commands & Colors got ripped off to varying degrees, and the designers didn’t have a lot of legal fallback. That’s because copyright only protects the concrete representation of a game and patents, which could protect mechanics, are too expensive.

Today, that understanding of intellectual property law seems to be changing, so I wanted to post a short news piece talking about two new US court decisions.

Spry Fox vs Lolapps (2012) got quite a bit of attention a few years ago. It’s about an app, not a board game, but it’s now being used as the basis of more recent decisions, so it’s worth looking at. The suit centered on a rather innovative gaming app called Triple Town. Like many puzzle games of recent years, the object is to move identical objects together in a small grid, but here they form something else. Then another game called Yeti Town came around and Spry Fox, the Triple Town publisher, said it was a rip-off. Continue reading →