My guess is that the accuser is also infringing [LWN.net]

My guess is that the accuser is also infringing

Posted Apr 20, 2006 4:23 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: Rockbox's jewels

The jewels on both sides look very much like the ones from the very old X11 game "xjewel". Sure enough, I downloaded the source from the "oldstable" Debian package and it's dated 1995.

The README file says that the icons come from the Domain/Jewelbox game, and were "freely distributed", but that's not clear.

It turns out that Domain/Jewelbox is Copyright 1990 by Yoshihiro Satoh, from an arcade games collection. If the accuser bought the rights from Mr. Satoh, he has a leg to stand on, otherwise he might want to be quiet.

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My guess is that the accuser is also infringing

Posted Apr 20, 2006 4:51 UTC (Thu) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]

Actually, no. If you look at the screenshots of XJewel, you will see that its graphics are substantially different from both Rockbox Jewels and Rockbox Bejeweled. For example, the XJewel blue stone is presented viewed from the top; in Bejeweled and Rockbox it is viewed from the side. The orange stone in Xjewel is a cube drawn in isometric perspective; in Bejeweled and Rockbox it is more of a truncated hexagonal pyramid. The XJewel diamond is aligned differently from the one in Bejeweled and Rockbox; etc.

I would have say that Rockobx Jewels graphics were mostly based on Bejeweled, and not on XJewel. It is extraordinarily improbable that two independent game projects -- both starting from something like the 1993 XJewel graphics -- would end up with graphics that are so similar to each other and yet so different from their ancestral programs, unless the artists of one project were copying the other one's style.