Maestri Files Suit Against You Plus, Creators of Mobsters
It seems like only yesterday that news arose that Psycho Monkey is suing Zynga.
Now, it appears that Psycho Monkey, the company founded by Mob Wars creator and former SGN employee David Maestri, has filed suit again for copyright infringement – this time against You Plus, Inc. Known as “The Godfather” in the MySpace app gallery, You Plus is the creator of the number one MySpace game, Mobsters.
Mobsters is a mob-themed RPG/Strategy text-based game that makes use of the social capabilities of the MySpace Platform for its core game-play. Players build a mob, do missions, earn money, level up, and compete against other players for glory and supremacy (okay, maybe not so much, but you get the point).
Ironically, this is another “Mob Wars Clone” that may be more successful that the title it is “cloning.” In 2008, Mobsters was actually the most installed application on the platform, and as of last month, had 13,330,928 total users on MySpace. That same month, Mob Wars for Facebook sat at 2,850,189 monthly active users. MySpace doesn’t publish monthly active numbers for its applications.
While little has been published by the courts regarding the actual suit thus far, precedents like these in IP around social gaming are sure to be an interesting trend this year. The outcome of this and similar cases will have important effects on similar games across social networks as well as the iPhone in the months ahead.
The suit was filed on February 12, 2009 with the California Northern District Court over “Intellectual Property – Copyrights.” The court docket, “Psycho Monkey, LLC v. You Plus Inc.” can be found here.
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While not wanting to encourage game copying in any way, it’s hard to see where Maestri’s lawsuits are likeely to go except the bin. Game suits over copyright infringement rarely go anywhere because gameplay is not a copyrightable thing. This has been shown repeatedly in cases brought by the likes of TSR in the 80s against other companies using similar rpg mechanics to theirs. Such suits never fly.
What Maestri needs to show is not similarity but explicit copying. This means did someone use his game name and his logo, not something passingly similar or with the same idea, but actually the same thing that he copyrighted first. This is why game clones have always managed to survive the legal process.
So I’ll be surprised if either of these suits are upheld.
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