The World Handled A 'Wordle' Ripoff Just Fine Without Any IP Action

from the move-along dept

In the video game space, it has become commonplace to see creators freak out over "rip-offs" and "clones" of their games when the targets of their ire are actually not rip-offs or clones at all. This typically comes down to the all to common confusion over whether you can own or protect ideas versus specific expression. Typically in these stories, it turns out someone is complaining that they're seeing a similar idea in other games, whether it's first person shooters that share common features, the explosion of battle royale games, or even just artwork.

Which brings us to Wordle, a browser-based game that I gleefully enjoy telling my fellow Techdirt readers I have not played. However you feel about the game, it's notable in that its creator has been adamant about not monetizing the game, nor has he bothered registering any copyright or trademark for it. Between that and the game's popularity, there is a ton of goodwill there, which may explain why the world smacked down another person's attempt to actually clone (basically) the game into a mobile app that then required paid subscriptions for all of the features.

“I love Wordle so much I decided to make my own Wordle app but with a twist!” tech entrepreneur Zack Shakked wrote on Twitter yesterday. “There’s not just 5-letter words, but also 4, 6, and 7 letter words too! You can also play unlimited times if you’re on the Pro version.”

The new version of Wordle on the App Store didn’t just have bigger puzzles, it also required you to pay a subscription to unlock all of its features. It was a greedy innovation that, in the words of Any Baio, compounded the plagiarism into a “naked cash grab.” The downloads, reviews, and active paid trials instantly started rolling in.

Yes, they rolled in. And Shakked took to Twitter to brag about the adoption rate in the most irritating way possible.

"We're going to the fucking moon." That prediction turned out to be true, by which I mean the creator ended up in a place where all the oxygen had been sucked into a vacuum. See, that goodwill I mentioned before for the original Wordle creator led to the internet losing its damned fool mind over this cloning of the Wordle game into a money-grabbing app. In addition to Andy Baio dunking on Shakked, so did many, many others.

Cabel Sasser of indie studio Panic, the publisher behind Untitled Goose Game currently working on the Playdate handheld, responded to Shakked that he couldn’t wait to show Wordle’s true creator how to navigate the App Store takedown process. Others were more explicit. “Absolutely fuck you,” wrote Vlambeer cofounder Rami Ismail.

And eventually, Apple took the Shakked's app down. The reasons why are trivially easy to understand: the app called itself "Wordle", had nearly the exact same gameplay and look as the original game, and was clearly attempting to profit off of the work of others.

But notably absent in all of this was anything related to actual intellectual property registrations and the like. The world managed to take the right and corrective action on a bad actor without talking about copyright, trademarks, lawyers, cease and desist notices, DMCA takedowns, or any of that. You can chalk some of this up to our general ownership culture I suppose, but the truth is this all feels like the public doing its thing via a backlash on someone doing something shitty and Apple responding to that.

Which leads to the obvious question: why can't this be the norm?

Filed Under: content moderation, copycats, games, trademark, wordle, zack shakked
Companies: apple

Mixer Shuts Down, Showing Again Why You Don't Need To Freak Out By Copycat Competitors

from the getting-twitchy dept

In all sorts of intellectual property conversations, one common refrain is something like "If you let people copy others, those copycats will be just as successful without having to work to develop a product." This ire is most commonly aimed at big companies that see something successful and simply come up with their own version of it. And, to be generous, there certainly does seem to be something less than fair about that. But then you take a step back and watch just how often these copycat startups fall flat on their faces and you have to wonder why anyone worries about this stuff at all. Does nobody remember Google Plus?

Other companies have shown that it often builds more trust to not care about copycats any further than poking fun at them. Again, this is because the innovator almost always has a massive leg up on the copycat competitor, rather than the other way around. The most recent example of this is Microsoft's Mixer platform, which was supposed to be a streaming service geared towards video gaming, with Twitch being the competition it was trying to "copy" off of. Well, even with the corporate power and war chest of Microsoft behind it, the platform failed and has since been offloaded to Facebook Gaming.

The shutdown starts today, with a transition plan laid out by Microsoft for Mixer streamers. Mixer Partners will be granted partner status with Facebook Gaming, and the platform will honor and “match all existing Partner agreements as closely as possible,” according to the blog detailing the change.

Several big-name streamers, such as Ninja and Shroud, moved from Twitch exclusively to Mixer this year. On Twitter, popular streamer King Gothalion announced he would be moving to Facebook; earlier this year, he signed a deal to stream exclusively on Mixer.

Even with some pretty big streaming names on the service, Mixer failed. Why? Well, because Twitch had already built up an audience and trust within the public for its product. Microsoft didn't do enough to make Mixer stand apart from Twitch. Instead, the strategy appeared to roughly be just throwing money at some high profile streamers and expect audiences to flock to the platform because of it. That didn't work, however.

Those streamers will now be free to move on to either Facebook Gaming or back to Twitch, where most of them began. Where the majority decide to go will be quite telling, but I imagine Facebook will throw money at this the same way Microsoft did. And if Facebook doesn't do enough to make Gaming stand out and special compared with Twitch, it'll likely fail in exactly the same way. What we've seen from Facebook Gaming thus far, however, does have some more intriguing social and DIY elements.

But the real lesson here is that building a copycat startup isn't some get rich quick scheme. Or, it is, but it rarely works. So if you create a great platform, build a great community, and deliver great content... you probably are wasting time if you're worrying about copycats.

Filed Under: big companies, competition, copycats, mixer, startups, streamers, video streaming
Companies: microsoft, mixer, twitch

How Not To Freak Out When Someone Copies Your Product

from the monkey-see,-monkii-do dept

One of the things we've talked about for decades at Techdirt is that companies need to not freak out so much when someone copies their product -- whether physical or digital. There are some who believe you need to stop copying at any cost. That always seemed silly for multiple reasons. First, if you have something people want, it's going to get copied. At some point you have to do something of a cost benefit analysis of whether or not it's truly worth it to go crazy stopping every copy. Second, if you truly created the original, then you have a leg up on any copycat, in that you have a much better understanding of just about everything: you understand the customers better, you've built up brand loyalty and you understand the hidden reasons why people like your product. So you'll almost certainly continue to innovate above and beyond any copycats. Third, many efforts to stop copycats end up punishing your actual customers, saddling them with a worse product because you're so overly concerned about copying. This is a story of a company that has gone in the other direction.

For the last year or so, I've been telling a bunch of people about my exercise regime (my coworkers are sick of hearing about it). It began two years ago when I saw a Kickstarter project for Monkii Bars 2 -- a suspension training system not unlike TRX (if you're familiar with that), but a lot more portable. If you spend time on Kickstarter, there are a ton of exercise equipment products there, but nearly all of it looks like most late night infomercial crap (also, I noticed that most of them are based in LA, which perhaps isn't too surprising). Most of them look snazzy, but also are likely to be the kinds of things that no one ever uses for more than a week. The Monkii bars didn't look like that at all, though. First, it was from a Colorado company, and the team who made it seemed more like the kind of people I'd actually hang out with, rather than the folks who pitch most exercise equipment. More importantly, though, something about the way the Monkii Bars worked just seemed like a perfect way to get a workout. For whatever reason, I knew that they wouldn't be a "use it for a week and forget about it" kind of thing (though, I did still at least worry a little bit they would turn out that way).

But what really pushed me over the edge in deciding to back the project was two things. First, they not only had a successful Kickstarter campaign under their belts, but you could see that many backers of the new campaign were returning customers who raved about the original. That's always a good sign. Second, and more importantly, on their own website they had a page on how to make your own monkii bars, with the following:

Our number one goal here at monkii.co isn’t to sell monkii bars – it’s to get people to be more active. So when we started hearing that a small number of people thought monkii bars were too expensive and that they could make them on their own, we decided to help them. We reached out to Cooper over at GarageGymReviews.com who has some experience making DIY versions of products. So whether you buy monkii bars from us, or make your own, it’s time to get wild.

To me, that showed tremendous confidence in what they were building. It made me trust them more, and even though they were showing how to make your own for much, much less than the cost of buying the full product from them, it made me much more willing to pay them for the product.

It seemed many others felt the same way, and the Monkii Bars 2 raised over a million dollars (much more than the ~$100k of their first product). There were some manufacturing delays (ah, Kickstarter...) but they were pretty upfront and transparent about the reasons for the delays, including making the product significantly better between product launch and delivery. I got mine over a year ago, and they were exactly what I hoped they would be. They were a perfect way to get a really good, thorough workout nearly anywhere. I've used them at home, at the office, in hotels, at parks, while camping and more. I take them basically everywhere I go and, somewhat incredibly, I always feel like I want to work out more when I use them (in contrast to other things, or going to the gym, where I tend to want to just get it over with).

And, of course, once the 2nd version was out, the monkii's updated their DIY page, with details on how to make your own of the 2nd version as well. Last fall, the company's founder, Dan Vinson, went on the CNBC show Adventure Capitalists, which is basically a "Shark Tank" for exercise equipment, and what amazed me was that just as one investor is getting really into investing, Dan mentions the DIY page... and the investor initially flips out. He actually threatened to pull the investment because he thought Dan was crazy to tell people how to make their own, and thought that would sink the entire company. Eventually that investor did come around, and you could see a light bulb go off in his head that building trust and a community means you can sell a product even when you're teaching people how to make their own.

That brings us almost up to the present day. A few months back, Monkii launched its third product, called "Pocket Monkii," which is an even smaller and more portable version. I will admit that I was backer number 38 out of over 8,000. Given my experience with the company and the Monkii Bars 2 it was a no brainer.

And then last week, in an update to the Kickstarter, they mentioned that others were knocking off the Pocket Monkii. The update was really notable. I'm so used to seeing companies flip out and freak out about copycats, and get angry and aggressive. But, the Monkii guys seem to find the whole thing fairly amusing. Even the subject line, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" gives you a suggestion of how they see this.

As many of you already know, we’ve been knocked off! What started as a blatant copy of our content (literally pictures of monkii Dan and pocket monkii with the logo removed), has now turned into their own brand and imitation of our product - a cheaply made and low quality one at best.

They do note that they've asked for versions using monkii's own images to be taken down, with mixed levels of success, but they don't seem too bothered by it and literally suggest that everyone have a good laugh about it:

So what now? Well, let’s take a moment to have a good laugh:

1. They keep switching the product name, and it just keeps getting worse and worse… From “Fitness Pocket”, it has now morphed into “Body Pocket” – We don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound right to us.

2. For some reason, they think that their product looks better upside down.

But then, the real kicker. The update notes of the copycats: "They used our old design that doesn’t work very well." Followed by:

Wait, what? An old design that doesn’t work very well? But that’s the design I see on your Kickstarter page and in the video.

Here’s the thing – we always take beta-monkiis’ feedback into account and improve the design up until the last possible moment.

The problem with the old design was that it was annoyingly difficult to close the case, and if you could actually manage to close it, it looked completely “wonky." Through beta-monkii feedback, we realized that we were stuck in our old ways – trying to apply the existing kit design for MB2 to pocket monkii – when the best path forward was to take a fresh look at our new product and design a case built from scratch specifically for it.

That’s exactly what we did – we’re proud to say it’s a much better design and we know you’ll love it. Don’t worry – it still has the same look, feel, and form-factor. We even stepped up the quality a notch. Oh, if you added the Outdoor Anchor Accessory, you'll be pleased to know it features a sleek way to carry that in the case too.

This is another perfect example of what I discussed at the start. The original creators understand the market better, they understand the customers better and they understand the product better, which lets them innovate faster and better. And, rather than freak out about copycats, they just laugh at them and build a better product. And, really, if you want a "knockoff" I fully expect that the head Monkiis will end up putting up a DIY plan at some point for the new version as well. But it still won't be as nice as getting the real, professionally made version.

Filed Under: competition, copiying, copycats, counterfeits, innovation, knockoffs, monkii bars
Companies: monkii

Chinese High-Tech Startups: Now More Copied Than Copying

from the time-to-wake-up dept

Techdirt has been pointing out for a while that the cliché about Chinese companies being little more than clever copycats, unable to come up with their own ideas, ceased to be true years ago. Anyone clinging to that belief is simply deluding themselves, and is likely to have a rude awakening as Chinese high-tech companies continue to advance in global influence. China's advances in basic research are pretty clear, but what about business innovation? That's an area that the US has traditionally prided itself on being the world leader. However, an interesting article in the South China Morning Post -- a Hong Kong-based newspaper owned by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of $400 billion -- explores how it's Chinese ideas that are now being copied:

it's a reflection of a growing trend in which businesses across Southeast Asia look to China for inspiration for everything from e-commerce to mobile payment systems and news apps.

Once derided as a copycat of Western giants, Chinese companies have grown in stature to the point that in many areas they are now seen as the pinnacle of business innovation.

The article mentions dockless bike-sharing, which is huge in China, being copied in California by a startup called Limebike. It notes that Thailand's central bank has introduced a standardized QR code that enables the country's smartphone users to pay for their purchases simply by scanning their devices -- a habit that is well on the way to replacing cash and credit cards in China. In Malaysia, an online second-hand car trading platform Carsome based its approach closely on a Chinese company operating in Nanjing. Other copycats of Chinese innovators include:

Orami, Thailand's leading e-commerce business, which started out as a clone of China's online baby product platform Mia; Offpeak, a Malaysian version of the Chinese group buying website Meituan; and BaBe, an Indonesian news app that borrowed the business idea from China's Toutiao and has been downloaded more than 10 million times.

As the article points out, it is perhaps natural that entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia should look to China for ideas given the commonalities of culture. But that kind of creative borrowing can only occur if Chinese companies are producing enough good business ideas that are worth copying. It's evident that they are, and it's time that the West recognized that fact.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: china, copycats, copying, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups

The Unintended Consequences Of The Shutdown Of Silk Road

from the yes,-it's-gone,-but-now-what dept

The closing down of Silk Road by the feds was almost certainly inevitable. In fact, especially in light of the details suggesting how sloppy Ross Ulbricht was at times, it's somewhat amazing it lasted as long as it did. That said, in the past few days I've seen a couple of articles that are highlighting the unintended consequences of the closure. First up is Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic, discussing how the closure of Silk Road almost certainly makes the world less safe. In some ways, this reminds me of similar discussions about targeting marketplaces vs. targeting users (such as Craigslist). While many people have a gut reaction that it makes sense to go after the marketplace/platform, the reality is that it's the users that drive it, and those users will continue to do the same illegal acts as before, but most likely in a less safe manner.

Friedersdorf highlights how, assuming everything in the NY complaint is accurate, Silk Road functioned as a fairly safe and efficient market for buying what generally appeared to be high quality illegal drugs for personal use in a much safer and more trusted manner than going out on the street to do the same. And, on top of that, it appears that many of the sellers were from overseas where the drug trade might be even more dangerous:

On many thousands of occasions, drug dealers in foreign countries decided that, rather than using armed truck drivers, bribed customs agents, desperate drug mules, thuggish regional distributors, and street level drug dealers who used guns to defend their territory, they’d just mail drugs directly to their far away customers. Of course, folks at the beginning of the supply chain were still often violent drug cartels who one hates to see profit. But from the perspective of the many innocents who suffer from the black market supply chains involved in traditional drug sales, narcotics via mail order would seem to be a vast improvement.

The FBI summed up its case against The Silk Road by writing that “the site has sought to make conducting illegal transactions on the Internet as easy and frictionless as shopping online at mainstream e-commerce websites.” Insofar as it trafficked in violence-for-hire and hacked bank accounts, that was a bad thing — society has an interest in as much friction as possible in the market for hit men! But compared to the epidemic violence that has characterized the drug trade for the entirety of the War on Drugs, and that shows no signs of abating in the foreseeable future, a frictionless drug trade starts to seem like a relative utopia.

The “friction” is often dead teenagers on urban streets.

Of course you could make an argument that Friedersdorf's argument is almost as much a condemnation of the overall War on Drugs as it is on Silk Road itself. In fact, you could argue that the "success" of Silk Road highlights how a legal and regulated market for such drugs would likely be quite efficient and safe. That's not a "defense" of Silk Road or a suggestion that what Ulbricht did was morally correct. However, it's just a statement of reality. The War on Drugs has a very large number of victims, and many of them are totally unrelated to drug addicts, but rather come with the infrastructure necessary to run a massive illegal business.

That brings us to the second article. Someone who worked for a competing online black market called Atlantis, which had closed just a few weeks earlier, has written up a fascinating post mortem of Silk Road, in which he (or she) notes that we're about to see a lot of similar black markets now that the market leader has been cleared out by the feds.

As if there wasn’t enough suitors ready to rise to the challenge of being the next DPR, to make it easier there is already a functioning open-source project know as BitWasp which can simply be downloaded and installed on an onion web server and the next SilkRoad is (almost) ready to go. Below is a short description of the project from its facebook page where they make no secret of the fact the project aims to aid the development of future anonymous marketplaces flowing in the case of busts like just happened Silk Road.

“BitWasp Marketplace is a light weight, completely open source, anonymous bitcoin marketplace specifically built for use in conjunction with Tor or I2P via the hidden services such as .onion websites and eepsites (for I2P).

The goal of this project is to do the following:

1. Lower the barrier of entry and needed skill-set to operate a website like silkroad. This will increase the number of silkroad styled sites on the internet, and this increase will lead to a stronger pressure on governments to change their draconian drug law policies into something more practical and respecting of individual liberty.

Just like open source forum software revolutionized the ability for individuals to freely share ideas within niche communities, Bitwasp will revolutionize the ability for individuals to sell and buy materials and digital files within online communities.

2. Plans by the many, not by the few. This is essential because, as with nature, competition will select for the best, most secure, and most revolutionary marketplaces. Silkroad is great; but I suspect many minds working on many sites with various add-ons and extensions will lead to many better marketplaces in the long run.”

In other words, just like the court shutting down Napster over a decade ago resulted in a whole series of alternative file sharing networks, some that were much more underground and harder to stop, it seems likely that something similar is about to happen with black markets. In fact, the former Atlantis employee notes that the combination of Ulbricht's carelessness and the fact that it took nearly two and a half years to track him down likely means that others will rush into the space, believing they can do it "right" to protect themselves.

The closing of Silk Road and the arrest of Ulbricht is an interesting story, no doubt, but it seems like just the very first chapter in the world of black markets.

Filed Under: copycats, drug dealing, safety, security, shutdown
Companies: silk road

Surprise: Sony Decides Not To Sue Over Copycat Game; Says Legal Action Wouldn't Be Beneficial

from the you-don't-have-to-sue dept

All too often, when it comes to copying one another, companies seem to feel that they have to sue. In fact, there are times when we see copyright and patent holders bizarrely claim that not suing is not an option. So here's a bit of a surprise. A. Yeh points us to a story of a Korean company, Netmarble, who produced a game called Everybody Cha Cha Cha, which some claimed was a pretty close copy of a Sony min-game called Everybody's Stress Buster. To be clear, the two games do seem pretty similar... but also seem to use pretty standard driving game mechanics found in tons of games throughout the history of video games. You can see the two in this video. Stress Buster is on top, Cha Cha Cha on the bottom. Sony did initially cry foul at this copying, leading NetMarble to (amusingly) claim that Sony was trying to piggyback on its success. Of course, after that NetMarble then started adding a bunch of other features to its game to further distinguish it from the Sony game. Oh look, competition spurring innovation.

Either way, in the end, Sony decided not to pursue any sort of legal response. While it still uses some slightly menacing language about how this doesn't mean they've settled, Sony admits that any "prolonged controversy" over this wouldn't be beneficial for the mobile game development community.

According to ET News and This Is Game, Sony told the Korean media that it did not want to "hamper" the mobile gaming industry in Korea.

A Sony spokesperson is quoted by This Is Game as saying, "We were concerned that any prolonged controversy such as this is not beneficial for both the local and the international mobile game development community. Internally, we decided not to pursue any legal action as long as no additional problems arise. Some may think it's because we've settled with Netmarble already, but we are simply choosing not to pursue legal action in a broader view/sense. This does not mean we have settled with Netmarble."

That's a fairly enlightened view, actually. It's one that we've suggested in the past, though. Even as it may be frustrating and annoying to have someone copy you, going legal in response often is not the best strategic response. We've urged companies to recognize that fact, and kudos to Sony for holding back on releasing the legal hounds upon realizing the cost-benefit analysis meant it wouldn't be helpful (and would possibly be harmful to the wider community).

Filed Under: copycats, everybody cha cha cha, everybody's stress buster, lawsuits
Companies: netmarble, sony

The Advantage Of Copycat Startups: Will Rolling.fm Keep Turntable.fm Innovating?

from the one-can-hope dept

We've written a few times about the wonders of Turntable.fm, one of the first new music services that really seems to get the fact that part of what makes music so enjoyable is the social experience. It's a wonderful service. However, as with anything that gets a lot of users and attention, it isn't long before copycats come along. And, as Eliot van Buskirk has reported, Turntable.fm has a copycat in the form of Rolling.fm, a service that almost certainly chose to copy an awful lot from Turntable.fm. Of course, as with many "copycats," it appears that Rolling.fm has tried to add some features that sound useful, "such as the ability to see who is in a room in one big list, and a private chat feature that lets you speak directly to Facebook friends even if they�re in a different room." But I tend to agree with Eliot in noting that this is not a bad thing:

Who cares? The world needs all the neat ways to listen to music it can get, from where we�re standing. It�s a case of �the more the merrier� � even if Rolling.fm is quite possibly the least original web app we�ve ever seen.

It�s also a case of �different strokes for different folks.�

The Rolling.fm group-listening web app differs from Turntable.fm in that many of the most popular rooms correlate to specific colleges and universities (although anyone can join those rooms). And so far, we�re hearing far clubbier and less indie music than we generally hear on Turntable.fm.

Who knows � we could be just about to witness an explosion of group listening services, each with its own twist on the Turntable.fm concept that will appeal to a different demographic. While Turntable.fm deserves ample credit for coming up with the concept, it can�t really be bad for music fans if that concept continues to be replicated as it has been here�

I'd go even further than that. Copycats like this actually help everyone, including Turntable.fm. Not only does it help spread the concept even further, but Turntable.fm can just as equally learn from the "improvements" a copycat makes. On top of that, this will help keep Turntable.fm on its toes. As much as I love the service, and as much as I understand that it's very much in beta and at times struggles with the amount of usage it gets, the service has been really buggy at times and having some direct competition in the rear view mirror can only act as an incentive to improve as quickly as possible.

Last year, we wrote about Oded Shenkar's excellent book Copycats, which argues, persuasively, that our cultural distaste towards companies that copy one another is misplaced and not very sensible. There are tremendous benefits to be had when two or more companies copy each other, mainly in that it continues to push all players to innovate and to provide better overall offerings. While I haven't been able to test out Rolling.fm yet (it was down when I went to check it out), I think this development is really good news for Turntable.fm and hope that the company is willing to recognize that as well.

Filed Under: competition, copycats, copying, innovation, music, social
Companies: rolling.fm, turntable.fm