Brandon Koppy author page

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who is shredding a solo with his ax.

Caleb Rasmussen had a Tetris-themed crossword a decade ago. Should Caleb sue Brandon? Should the famously litigious Tetris company sue the NYT? There are some interesting copyright issue parallels between Tetris and crossword puzzles.

You can't copyright "ideas" (like the rules of a game), but you can copyright expressions (implementations) of those ideas. That might seem clear, but it is open to vast interpretation that often has to be settled in court. Tetris Holdings, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. confirmed that Tetris owned the shape of the pieces (called tetriminoes — that name now trademarked) and the exact 10x20 field size. If you make a Tetris clone, you will get sued. Even if the company doesn't consider you a threat, they have to take active steps to protect their claims, or they will lose them.

Some games are copyrighted, and some aren't. The maker of Sudoku didn't protect his invention and never made a penny despite the huge popularity of that game. The KenKen inventor was more careful and presumably has made many pennies. Wordle had prior art and so isn't protected, but the NYT gave "low seven figures" to its inventor for the Wordle name and for the URL, which now redirects to nytimes.com.

Crossword-like games were published as far back as the 1870s, and nobody claims they own that puzzle type, but crosswords uniquely contain themes and clues that are created anew for each puzzle. The NYT, like all publishers, claims copyright on each puzzle, and we dutifully include that mark on each we display, but it's not clear what exactly that protects. Themes, as we've seen, repeat. There are only so many ways to clue words like ALAI. The complete grid and clue set seems like it deserves legal ownership, but what about grids that are so similar they likely started from theft of another published puzzle? Or is that even theft?

Without a definitive crossword case like Tetris v Xio, nobody knows where the boundaries are. Timothy Parker got defenestrated from USA Today and Universal Syndicate not through legal action but by public embarrassment. (NYT neither uncovered the plagiarism nor promoted the scandal.)

I suspect publishers like it this way. If there ever were a court case that defined the rules — and copyright and patent case resolutions often seem random — then everyone would have to comply, even if the rules were stupid.