logo
Apple defeats tech writer's copyright lawsuit over 'Tetris' movie

Apple defeats tech writer's copyright lawsuit over 'Tetris' movie

Reuters06-03-2025

March 6 - Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab convinced a New York federal court on Thursday to dismiss a copyright lawsuit brought by tech journalist Dan Ackerman, who accused the tech giant of ripping off his book about the landmark video game "Tetris" for a movie on the same subject.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla said, opens new tab that the book and the movie were not similar enough to support Ackerman's allegations.
Ackerman, Apple and attorneys for both sides did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision. The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to the game and was also a defendant, did not immediately respond to a similar request.
Ackerman's "The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World" was published in 2016. The book describes the Soviet history of the popular puzzle game and the fight for its global licensing rights as a "Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle," according to the lawsuit.
Ackerman said he sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Company earlier that year. He said the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book, dissuading film producers from adapting it, and sent him a "strongly worded cease and desist letter."
According to the complaint, the company's CEO Maya Rogers and screenwriter Noah Pink began copying Ackerman's book for the "Tetris" screenplay in 2017. "Tetris" was released in 2023 on the Apple TV platform. Ackerman sued Apple and the Tetris Company for copyright infringement later that year.
Failla dismissed Ackerman's case on Thursday, finding that the works' similarities were largely based on the same uncopyrightable facts about Tetris' history.
"Since Plaintiff's Book is a work of non-fiction, Defendants were entitled to use the facts contained in his Book in the making of their Film, so long as they did not copy his unique expression of those facts," Failla said.
The case is Ackerman v. Pink, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:23-cv-06952.
For Ackerman: Kevin Landau of the Landau Group
For the defendants: Barry Slotnick and Tal Dickstein of Loeb & Loeb

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Inside F1: The Movie – how Brad Pitt hit 180mph (with Lewis Hamilton's help)
Inside F1: The Movie – how Brad Pitt hit 180mph (with Lewis Hamilton's help)

Times

time2 hours ago

  • Times

Inside F1: The Movie – how Brad Pitt hit 180mph (with Lewis Hamilton's help)

What if you made Top Gun, but with cars? And if Tom Cruise isn't available, what if you cast Brad Pitt? The idea was simple, as the most successful in Hollywood often are. It started with the fact that Top Gun: Maverick had made $1.493 billion in 2022, thrilling a worldwide audience who had been stuck at home for two pandemic-heavy years. The movie was produced by the industry heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Beverly Hills Cop) and directed by Joseph Kosinski: together the two men had the sort of brainwave that could go on to make a further billion. The result? F1: The Movie is a racing movie that aims to bring the live thrills of Formula 1 and the behind-the-helmet personal dramas of the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive to the big screen (and later the small). Taking place over several key races, it's the first movie that effectively captures the details and daring of F1. Funded by Warner Bros and Apple, a studio and a streamer, it has had full co-operation from the official Formula 1 body (Lewis Hamilton is a producer) with a video game and soundtrack tie-in to boot. This is the modern way to make an enormous budget film — proving that the movies did not die, they just needed to collaborate more. 'I've been doing this for over 50 years and the same thing has been echoed again and again — that the cinema business is done,' Bruckheimer, 81, says. 'There was VHS, DVDs, multiple-channel TV, but we're still doing it.' He smiles. 'You have a kitchen, right?' I do. 'But you also go to restaurants?' Guilty. 'Why? Because the food is good and you want a change. So all we need is to make films people want to leave their home for. That's our job. And if we fail then, yes, we have a problem.' The titan behind behemoths from Top Gun to Armageddon and Con Air, Bruckheimer has made glossy action films that have changed Hollywood, for better or worse — ushering in today's multiplex era. Yes, he has had his flops, but there is a reason he is still making films in his eighties. First, he lives and breathes them. Second, he is very good at making money. Surely it is trickier now to predict a hit, when the industry has fragmented across various formats and platforms? 'Well, anybody who tells you they've made a hit movie is lying,' Bruckheimer says with a shrug. 'They have never known. You can put all the bells and whistles on a movie and have the best actors in the world, yet nobody shows up. You just don't know. It's always a crapshoot.' In F1: The Movie Pitt plays the fictional driver Sonny Hayes, a once brilliant racer whose career has been ruined by an accident (he is partly based on the British driver Martin Donnelly, who had a career-ending crash in 1990). Now retired, Hayes is called on by his old friend Ruben (Javier Bardem) to save his struggling team and try to improve the chances of their main driver, Joshua (Damson Idris). Filming began at Silverstone in 2023 and continued in Japan, Mexico, Abu Dhabi, Hungary, Italy and beyond. It is a truly international production, made at a time when President Trump is threatening tariffs on films not made in the US. Bruckheimer is a rarity in Hollywood, in that he has previously donated to the Republican Party. Does he think the Trump tariffs are workable? 'I don't think it's going to change anything,' he says. 'The only way America can deal with [movies being made abroad] is to be competitive with tax rebates — then they'll have a chance of keeping more movies in America. But when you can save 40 per cent by making a movie somewhere else, that will always be a big incentive to go.' I had read that the budget for F1: The Movie was $300 million, which would put it among the 15 most expensive films ever made and demand a huge box-office haul. 'It's quite a bit lower than that,' Bruckheimer says with a grin. 'Look, other studios try to inflate our budget to make their high budgets look lower, but it was a lot less. We had the advantage of putting advertising on the cars, so we saved a fortune. Sponsors all realised how important it was to get their product on a car driven by Pitt. That is pretty cool. That's how Hollywood miscalculated our number.' The film came about partly because Hamilton had wanted to be in Top Gun: Maverick, but the timings did not work out. He had stayed in touch with Kosinski, and became the technical adviser on F1, which puts cameras on real racing cars to make it as realistic as possible. The seven-time champion was able to tell the film-makers that they were, for instance, using the wrong gear on a turn — the sort of detail that matters to petrolhead punters. Hamilton was also adamant that the actors experience genuine speed: the film uses very little CGI. 'Throughout my career I would tell people how difficult it is in a race,' Hamilton says. 'And they would ask, 'How much weight did you lose?' or 'What bruises do you have?' We can lose up to ten pounds [during a race], so having these actors go through the challenges we do as racing drivers — the speed in which you're processing information, the effect on the body, the G-force — was really important. Because you can't fake that.' So, yes, that is the A-lister Pitt driving at 180mph. 'The expression on his face, that concentration and intensity? It's all real,' Kosinski says. 'That's not him acting — he is trying to keep himself alive at that moment.' Surely their insurance company balked at the idea of Pitt filming at those speeds? 'Well, people loved the idea, but when reality set in there was a lot of concern,' Kosinski says. 'And a lot of hand-wringing and conference calls. Ultimately, Brad's natural talent in the car allowed us to get it through.' • 10 best sporting lives on screen — from Maradona to Tonya Harding 'Our insurance policy put a limit on how fast Brad could drive,' Bruckheimer adds. 'It was about 160mph. But our stunt drivers went to the brokers and said, 'It's more dangerous to hold him back, because you need centrifugal force going into these corners.' And they bought it.' Over to audiences then, to see whether F1: The Movie will rival Asif Kapadia's Senna documentary as the racing fans' favourite. Bruckheimer has had hits with Eddie Murphy, Johnny Depp, Will Smith — is Brad Pitt an actor who makes people want to leave their house to watch a movie? 'We'll see, won't we?' F1: The Movie is in cinemas from June 25 Two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more

Shameless star made OBE says Prince of Wales joked about her playing Elizabeth I
Shameless star made OBE says Prince of Wales joked about her playing Elizabeth I

Powys County Times

time2 hours ago

  • Powys County Times

Shameless star made OBE says Prince of Wales joked about her playing Elizabeth I

Shameless star Anne-Marie Duff said she and the Prince of Wales laughed about her previous role playing Elizabeth I as she was formally made an OBE. Ms Duff, 54, played Fiona Gallagher in Channel 4's Shameless TV show and won a best supporting actress Bafta for her role as Grace Williams in Apple TV's series Bad Sisters. The actor also performed as Elizabeth I in the 2005 to 2006 BBC dramatisation of the monarch's life, titled The Virgin Queen. Discussing that role led William to joke 'this should all be old hat for you, or something' during Wednesday's ceremony at Windsor Castle, Ms Duff said. The actor spoke to the PA news agency inside the Berkshire royal residence after being formally made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to drama. Asked if the event had been as expected having played Elizabeth I, she said: '(Windsor Castle) is like a treasure chest, isn't it? Because every piece of every room is swollen with history and art and value, so it's very specific. 'To be in this environment where people do live and do sit down and have their dinner and all of those things – you know, when you're on location, you don't really have that feeling of something like that, but this is someone's home, which is just extraordinary to me.' The Virgin Queen was not filmed at royal residences for security reasons, she said. Ms Duff lives in north London and has a son with her former husband and Shameless co-star James McAvoy. She said she and the Prince of Wales discussed balancing work and parenting and 'how we're all kind of the same'. Her next guaranteed job is not until 2026 and she said she cannot talk about other projects that may pop up before then. 'There's so much nonsense now, you can't even read scripts now without NDAs (non-disclosure agreements)', she said. 'The streamers are like old Hollywood studios, it's like that, it's so bonkers, so you don't get to sort of enjoy the prelude to things with people – you can't say, oh my god, yeah, I'm going to be doing (this). You have to keep everything on the down-low.' She laughed as she said: 'I would love to tell you, Your Royal Highness, but … ' 'There are snipers everywhere, that's what it feels like, seriously, the walls have ears', she added. Ms Duff said a play would be the 'juiciest' next project for her because she prefers the 'communion with people' in theatre, as well as the immediacy and 'being in charge of the chronology'. She said she discussed her preference for the stage with William. She told PA: 'If a light bulb blows, we still go on. It's all of that and the jeopardy of it – when things go wrong, you become so resourceful and having each other's back as a company.' Asked how she felt after being formally made an OBE, Ms Duff said: 'Fabulous, really lucky. You never imagine that – I think especially for people who work in the arts – you never really have a sense of what you do as having a great deal of importance or being a contribution to anything. 'You're just so busy working away. It feels extraordinary to be recognised.'

Millions of iPhone users issued urgent App Store warning
Millions of iPhone users issued urgent App Store warning

South Wales Guardian

time3 hours ago

  • South Wales Guardian

Millions of iPhone users issued urgent App Store warning

Millions of iPhone users and Android users with Apps downloaded from the App Store or Google Store have been urged to ensure they are making security checks. Lee Elliott, chief product officer at Compare and Recycle, said: "Before installing an app from the App Store or Google Play, always ensure it is a verified app and pay attention to its reviews." Users should ensure apps are updated regularly and remember to install any security patches when prompted, too, Lee said. Mr Elliott said: "If you suspect your device has been infected, the first port of call is to turn off your mobile data or Wi-Fi, and uninstall any suspicious apps you can identify. "You could also perform a factory reset. "On Android phones you can run a built-in scan to search for malware and resolve the issue, but due to the OS architecture out of the box, iPhones are well protected and are not generally susceptible to security breaches. "If you're experiencing any strange pop-ups as an Apple user try clearing your browsing history and cache first, and it'll likely solve the problem." He said: "While staying aware of your surroundings is the least you can do to stop your phone being snatched in the first place, there are simple steps you can take to protect yourself and prevent the worst from happening. Recommended reading: "A lesser-known trick for iPhone users is to disable Control Centre access from the lock screen. "This prevents thieves from quickly switching off Wi-Fi or turning on Airplane Mode if they grab your phone while it's locked, helping you retain the ability to track the device via Find My iPhone and making them more likely to let go of the device. "Simply navigate to 'Face ID & Passcode' in settings and toggle off the option for accessing your control centre when the phone is locked."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store