Julien Mailland, The MIT Press Reader; The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
"Earlier this month, the Trump administration released a politically charged clone of Tetris called Build the Wall. The Tetris Company (TTC), which owns the rights to the iconic video game, swiftly responded with a thinly veiled legal threat, writing on X: “We take copyright infringement very seriously.” Four days later, the White House took down the game without explanation.
Whether TTC’s post prompted the removal is unknown. But the episode points to a broader and more dubious claim advanced by the company: that it holds exclusive rights to what it misleadingly refers to as “Tetris” pieces — and, more broadly, to any electronic puzzle that involves falling shapes. The claim relies on a flawed ruling rendered in 2012 in Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., a case in which a federal judge decreed that geometric forms made of four equal-sized squares, each joined together with at least one other square along an edge, were copyrighted and belonged to Russian engineer Alexei Pajitnov and game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers, collectively organized as TTC.
The problem: Pajitnov did not design these puzzle pieces, known as tetrominoes, and despite TTC’s relentless public-relations campaign to the contrary, they are not unique to Tetris. In fact, famed Caltech mathematician Solomon Golomb first described them in 1953 during a talk at the Harvard Mathematics Club, and they were later popularized in Scientific American."
