Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake Accused of Stealing Art

So a game based on Doodle Jump is moaning about another game where the graphics are 'simillar' ?

Plus they also have a game which is basically Flappy Bird (MonsterUp Flap). Plus they have a space shoot em up called Galaxium so they're basically trying to steal the famous Galaxian name

So its fine for them to basically steal ideas and just re-do the graphics (when essentially its the same game) ?

Seems very hypocritical

 

Why spam forums about it then ? Take it up with Apple or your lawyer. All I see are clones like doodle jump/flappy bird etc. just like you were inspired by these games perhaps the other company were inspired by your graphic style

 

Uh oh.... What's this all about?

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Multiformat/Monsters+Ate+My+Birthday+Cake/ip_news.asp?c=60294

 

There's barely any similarities here. The monsters look completely different, and the details of the island are different, too. It's ridiculous. An island with a cove??! The starting place in the bottom left?! Hills that are shaped like eggs like hundreds of other games with hills?!

The amount of second-hand embarrassment I feel for this guy is just...wow.

 

This response is, in fact, specifically to Mr. Sounas' infografic. I don't understand your reply to my post, as Mr. Sonas has a header which reads, I quote, "copies of my ideas!" and then proceeds directly to compare the skull, the cute monster characters, and a few other details. How can you claim that this is not the issue at hand when the infografic claims otherwise?

I understand Mr. Sounas' frustration quite well, but I think he rushed into a judgment without considering the origin of the similar elements, or how common similar elements are in modern games. Worst of all, I think the repercussions of such a claim have been poorly considered. This kind of claim is damaging to games, in general! Certain art elements are frequently found in games that have a common setting. Calling the common use of such elements "plagiarism" makes it more dangerous to produce any new game in a similar setting, and is a disservice to the games industry.

I leave you with a link to another completely unrelated work that shares graphical elements with both maps. Make of it what you will. http://www.cartoonnetwork.co.uk/sites/www.cartoonnetwork.co.uk/files/blogs/toonix-map.jpg

 

No art was stolen. Rather, it appears that one artist copied another artist's style. How indefensible that is would depend on how deeply you value originality, but I don't think it's a legal issue.

 

It's sort of funny because none of those things are "ideas". In any case, ideas are not even protected by copyright anyway... so if they were ideas he'd have no legal standing to complain.

 

Although I don't think that the two art styles look all that similar, I believe that in copyright law the law expects the person / company holding the copyright to vigorously defend its copyright - not doing that basically leaves it open to becoming public domain. So, I think that people trying to defend their work are put in a position of having to go after people they might not really want to, or even believe to be truly stealing their copyright for fear that the courts may later interpret their lack of pursuit as essentially leaving their work to the public domain.

 

second hand?

 

To be fair to the accuser,he does have some valid points on similarities.There may be some variations to the map style used and aspects of the characters etc etc in MAMBC but with the side by side comparison,it isn't hard to notice that the amount of similarities are too many to be a coincidence.However there are many games out there that copy or do variations of an original game out on the App Store.This guy probably feels threatened by it I suppose.I'm a little skeptical now by the game but I won't let that deter me from playing it.

 

@Pluto6: Technically correct, but not applicable here. Mr. Sounas seems to be suggesting that his designs have been used without his permission. This strikes me as a bad claim, because there is a lot of precedence for very similar designs predating Mr. Sounas' work. It's not possible to claim copyright over "island with skull-shaped rock feature on the bottom right" or "small hill decorated with diagonal lines..." And we can definitely see that no direct copying or tracing has taken place. In fact, the two artists have radically different styles from a design PoV: for example, Mr. Sounas uses a very nice, muted, earthy sort of palette in the vast majority of his works, and the other artist employs much brighter colors. The island Mr. Sounas created is equally divided into a "happy" and "dark" halves, while the island the other artist created is partitioned into more typical sorts of zones found in many games. Despite several strong similarities, I don't understand how anyone could claim that the second island, with all of its many distinctions, is not original work.

 

Who cares that's for those to sort out all we can do is guess and I'm sure someone will check it out properly, the pictures in general look cometely different to me it's just some details that are the same or similar which could be a mistake or inspiration. What's next? Stickman games getting sued for plagiarism.

I'd rather talk about the game and how good it is.