Atari v. Amusement World

Atari Inc. v. Amusement World Inc., 547 F.Supp. 222 (D. Md. Nov. 27, 1981) is a legal case where the United States District Court for the District of Maryland held that Amusement World's arcade game Meteors did not violate Atari's copyright in their game Asteroids. Despite the fact that Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, judge Joseph H. Young concluded that copyright only protects the specific expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. As one of the earliest legal rulings about copyright in video games, it is also one of the first cases to rule in favor of the defendant based on the idea-expression distinction that copyright does not protect broad ideas, only the unique expression an idea.

Background

Atari Inc. released Asteroids in October, 1979, an arcade game where the player controls a spaceship traveling through rival spaceships and other space debris. Asteroids was immediately successful upon release. It displaced Space Invaders by popularity in the United States and became Atari's best selling arcade game of all time, with over 70,000 units sold. Atari earned an estimated $150 million in sales from the game, and arcade operators earned a further $500 million from coin drops.

Amusement World was a small company of five employees who mainly repaired coin-operated games. Company president Stephen Holniker played Asteroids and felt that he could produce a game to compete in the marketplace. Meteors became Amusement World's first game, which drew the attention of Atari by March of 1981. Soon after, Atari filed suit and sought to enjoin Amusement World from manufacturing or distributing Meteors.

Ruling

The motion for injunctive relief was brought to the United States District Court for the District of Maryland and tried by district court Judge Joseph H. Young. Atari alleged that Meteors was substantially similar to Asteroids, and therefore an infringement of their copyright. Amusement World argued that granting Atari a copyright would effectively grant them a monopoly on a game about spaceships and asteroids. But Judge Young did grant copyright protection to Atari, for "the symbols that appear on the display screen, the ways in which those symbols move around the screen, and the sound emanating from the game cabinet". This would not be considered a monopoly, as it would allow the Defendants to use the idea of a game about asteroids, so long as they adopted a different expression of that idea, with different symbols, movements, and sounds.

After finding that Atari owned a valid copyright in their Asteroids game, he compared it to Meteors and found twenty-two instances where the games were identical or similar, as well as finding nine differences. The similarities included that both games had exactly three sizes of space rocks, as well as the rocks always splitting into two smaller, faster moving rocks. The controls for the ships were functionally identical, and both games awarded the player an extra life if they scored 10,000 points. The differences included that Meteors was a faster game, with differences in the movement of its rocks, as well as having color graphics compared to the black-and-white Asteroids.

In the Judge Young's analysis, he cited the principle of the idea-expression distinction from Mazer v. Stein in 1957, that "while one’s expression of an idea is copyrightable, the underlying idea one uses is not." The similarities between the games were determined to be intrinsic to overall idea of shooting down space rocks with a spaceship, and thus could not be protected by copyright. Calling most of these similarities "inevitable", Judge Young reasoned that the two games were different in terms of their overall feel, due to Meteors being faster, more difficult, and more graphically realistic.

In his concluding remarks, Judge Young explained that Amusement World "based their game on plaintiff's copyrighted game; to put it bluntly, defendants took plaintiff's idea. However, the copyright laws do not prohibit this. Copyright protection is available only for expression of ideas, not for ideas themselves. Defendants used plaintiff's idea and those portions of plaintiff's expression that were inextricably linked to that idea. The remainder of defendants' expression is different from plaintiff's expression." Thus, the court denied Atari's motion for a preliminary injunction, with Amusement World succeeding in their defense.

Effects

Early in the development of video game law, it was part of the "Atari trilogy" of cases, including Atari v. Williams, and Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp. Atari Inc. v. Amusement World was the first copyright case where the court compared the numerous similarities and differences between two video games, as well as the first time that a court applied complex copyright principles to video games, such as the idea-expression distinction and scenes-a-faire. At the time, it was one of the only cases to rule in favor of the defendant, based on the idea-expression distinction that copyright does not protect broad ideas, only the unique expression. Writing for the Vanderbilt Law Review in 1983, Steven G. McKnight argued that the judge's analysis of game "feel" was inadequate if they did not play the games in question. In the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Thomas Hemnes argued that the court "blurs the very distinction between idea and expression", highlighting more "particularized" implementations such as the same three sizes of rocks that split into two rocks upon destruction.

Legacy

Intellectual property attorney Stephen McArthur notes that this was the first of nearly a dozen rulings in favor of alleged video game clones, "pav[ing] the way for developers to create games closely resembling established and successful games", with courts only shifting nearly 30 years later in Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps, Inc. and Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. Greg Lastowka states that the idea-expression dichotomy established in Asteroids was difficult to apply in the Spry Fox and Tetris Holdings disputes from 2013. He compared the Amusement World case to other early copyright cases, questioning "what made a video game involving spaceships and space rocks an unprotected idea", while contrasting it with the court in Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp. that gave copyright protection to Pac-Man's "pie-shaped gobbler and four ghost monsters as a particularized form of expression". Writing in 2018, Tori Allen says this case represents the rudimentary composition of early video games that made it difficult to discern between idea and expression, with video games progressing in their expression to allow more copyrightable game elements.