One of my favorite all-time iPhone games, StoneLoops of Jurassica, has been removed from the App Store due to copyright claims from a competitor, the makers of Luxor. One of the developers of the game, Maciej Biedrzycki, posted the following explanation on his blog:
About 3 weeks ago we have learned that MumboJumbo supplied Apple with a formal complaint and a request to remove StoneLoops! from the AppStore. The reason? Infringing Luxor copyright, confusing customers, stealing Luxor’s look & feel and even stealing their source code! This might sound absurd to anyone who knows both games but apparently Apple decided otherwise as we’ve been requested to prepare a formal response, which we did. We described how ungrounded each claim is and supplied various materials to back our claims.
Among all the MumboJumbo claims there was a single one which had some merit. The users were able to input “Luxor” in the iTunes search field and StoneLoops! was one of the returned results. Of course Luxor was still the first result. This was because the game description featured several excerpts from game reviews. The one which caused the “problem” was a citation from GameZebo – “more than worthy match for even more established industry goliaths like Zuma and Luxor…”. Our response was that we are willing to remove this part from the game description if Apple decides that this common practice is not appropriate in this situation.
Several weeks have passed since our response and we started thinking that Apple has ruled in favor of our explanations. Unfortunately to our great surprise today we have learned that StoneLoops! had been removed from the AppStore. It was also quite a shock to learn that the final decision was actually made by MumboJumbo as apparently Apple asked them if our response was satisfactory. Of course MumboJumbo replied that they still want StoneLoops! removed. After all if you were to decide whether your direct competition will be allowed to sell products or not, would you allow them? Talk about unfair competition – Luxor is selling, StoneLoops! is not.
In a world of YouTubes and App Stores, a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach is an all-too frequent occurrence these days. Instead of our government wasting time investigating things that actually benefit consumers like Google Voice, they should take a peek at what could be seen as anti-competitive fraud that these copyright claims sometimes turn out to be.