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Response from PopCap

Response from PopCap

Posted Apr 18, 2006 1:21 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
In reply to: Response from PopCap by TwoTimeGrime
Parent article: Rockbox gets cease-and-desisted

To me, they look nothing alike. The blue and orange gems, in particular, show a huge design difference. On the other hand, PluginJewels looks almost exactly like a scaled-down version of the Geweled gems, which are known to be free.


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Response from PopCap

Posted Apr 18, 2006 1:53 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Indeed, here's the Geweled graphics:
1) http://sebdelestaing.free.fr/gweled/Images/gweled_screens...

When comparing to these (as mentioned before):
2) http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/pub/Main/PluginJewels/jewels... (rockbox)
3) http://www.astraware.com/products/bejeweled/palm/bejewele... (bejeweled)

...it is my opinion that 1) and 2) are from the same art base and they are not modified versions of 3), and are cleanroom.

Now, how close can they be to another game and not be in violation of copyright? I don't know. I am reasonably confident after close examination that the art in the 1) and 2) does not contain data from 3), however.

redrawn != "cleanroom"

Posted Apr 18, 2006 2:58 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

...it is my opinion that 1) and 2) are from the same art base and they are not modified versions of 3), and are cleanroom.

Indeed, the Rockbox developers themselves state that their graphics are taken from Gweled (see above), and the Gweled author claims to have created "SVG original graphics".

However, this doesn't make them "cleanroom"—that term (which is usually applied to reverse engineering efforts) would imply that the Gweled graphics were created by someone who had never seen the Bejeweled graphics. I highly doubt that is the case here.

The question is, were the elements of the Bejeweled graphics that were (probably) copied sufficiently original to be copyrightable? (i.e., the shapes of the jewels and their facets, their coloration, and the general shading of the facets.)

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