No, because being proactive 1. shows due diligence on caffeine's part and 2. allows PageRank on the new domain to begin accumulating.
Precisely. Tetrisconcept is hardly massive. It's not like we have hoards of users. It's also not like we're actually causing TTC any trouble. Yes, we use the word Tetris, which is a trademark, but we're not causing loss of income. By making fangames, you're creating alternative games and possibly reducing the number of games TTC sells, and therefore it's worth them chasing you down and threatening to sue you. I can't really see them finding Tetrisconcept responsible for anything other than advertising and promoting the games. We don't claim to be an official site either.
I think we'd be fools to change unless asked. Which will never happen unless TTC is insanely stupid. Do you know how much bad press you'd get attacking a profitless fan resource for such a beloved game? Kotaku would be all over that kind of story.
additionally, there is just no other word that can describe block falling games better than just TETRIS !! tetris ought to be a public domain name and not a trademark. by the way: is there such thing like a "creative commons trademark" that protects a new trademark against commercial companies, but allows fair use for private projects? i was searching in the creative commons homepage, but got confused...
The current site is either under the rader of TTC or simply tolerated. Neither scenario is likely to change unless it starts profitting from the trademark, so I say leave it as it is.
Falling block games are called "falling block games" or "ochimono games". I've tried to push "tetromino game" or "Soviet Mind Game" (the latter found on the packaging of Tengen's recalled product) as a generic alternative, in the same way that "sparkling wine" and "crmant" are generic terms for the kind of wine associated with Champagne, France. No. Trademark law at least in the United States requires a trademark owner to be careful about licensing, handling each licensee on a case-by-case basis, so that the mark isn't ruled generic. See naked licensing. However, there is a structure called a certification mark. The latter, as kbr420 posts here. If someone starts distributing copies of LJ source and binaries for a fee (as is their right under the GNU General Public License), then LJ has become commercialized in the same way as, say, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. But then the LJ manual doesn't use the word "TETRIS" to refer to anything but products associated with Elorg or Mirrorsoft.
This is the worst possible name. You know the Russians actually took offense to the original marketing campaign for Tetris right? As I recall, the worst offender was even recalled.
I doubt they could start berating Tetrisconcept over Lockjaw. Its got a lot of discussion here, but it's not even hosted on the site. And if someone else was to be charging for it, then that's even less to do with TC.
As far as I can tell from the History article on the wiki and its references, Tengen's product was recalled not because of "Soviet Mind Game" marketing but for a different reason: Andromeda/Mirrorsoft fell far behind on royalty payments to Elorg.
coming back to the original topic of this thread, a unified TC guideline: i think there is a simple and very obvious solution to the initial piece orientation problem. its so simple.. remove any fixed initial piece orientations and instead present pieces with randomised initial orientation. of course, this would add a bit of extra challenge to the game! but hey... instread of ever increasing speeds, why not increase difficulty and complexity of some gameplay aspects a bit?
I'm not talking about the NES Tengen Tetris... There was a PC version who's cold war themed backgrounds offended them. Generally I don't think they liked that branding of the game. Also, Pazhitnov likes to describe it as a universal game. There's nothing particularly Soviet about it... These days Tetris is more Japanese than anything else.
hi guys, TC IS IN TROUBLE!!! LOL, j/k I've mentioned TC to upper management many times, and not once have I heard of any legal action being taken. This place should be okay. One word of advice - NEVER HOST ANY TETRIS GAMES THAT ARE NOT AUTHENTIC.
What about hosting games that are authentic? omgpiracylol! In all seriousness though, TC is a forum and a wiki.. hosting games seems out of the scope.
just an example on how fair and easy it COULD be concerning trademarks: http://perl.oreilly.com/usage/ "We will license the camel image widely for open source products and non-commercial sites related to Perl, requiring only an acknowledgement of its trademark status and a link to www.perl.com. so, it seem to be easily possible to allow a fan game to carry the name tetris and even some sort of well recognised tetris logo if it adds "tetris(r), used with permission by www.tetris.com" are there any reasons this is not possible with ttc? well if, we all know why..
That implies we've had permission, which so far we haven't. To get it, we'd have to ask for it, and there's no reason why they couldn't just say "No, we want you to shut the site down" instead.
