Noah Witherspoon, the developer of Tris, a free version of Tetris has reported on his blog that he has received a notice from Apple to remove his popular iPhone App as "The Tetris © Company", the owner of Tetris© IP and developer of the official Tetris iPhone app believes that it violates its copyright.
You can checkout the details after the jump.
Noah Witherspoon, a college student had ported his jailbroken iPhone app with the same name "Tris" to the App Store to bring the free version of Tetris© to the iPhone. The official Tetris© iPhone app is available for $9.99 in the App Store.
Folks at Touch Arcade who reviewed the iPhone app had this to say:
"Touch controls move pieces left, right, down and even up, while
tapping allows you to rotate your piece. The actual game is nicely
implemented with attractive graphics and smooth animation. Tris
also offers a global high-score system so you can compare your play
with others. A lack of sound effects or music, however, makes the
gameplay a little unsatisfying. Fortunately, you can play your own
music in the background. Still, it’s hard to complain about free."
Tris which was released on Aug 15 seems to have done amazingly well in the short duration it has been available. The developer claims that it was downloaded half a million times (as of Aug 19, 2008). This probably prompted "The Tetris© Company", the owner of Tetris© IP to contact Apple to remove Tris from the App Store to safeguard their interest.
Witherspoon believes that "The Tetris© Company" copyright claims would get thrown out if it went to court. However, as he does not have the resources to fight this in court, he plans to remove his iPhone App from the App Store on tomorrow (Aug 27, 2008).
So don’t miss out on the chance to download your free copy of Tris from iTunes link before it gets removed from the App Store.
Tris thus joins a growing list of iPhone apps such as NetShare, BoxOffice, I am Rich etc that have been removed from the App Store for various reasons.
I won’t be surprised to see Tris available for download as a jailbroken app via Cydia or the Installer app.
What do you think?
Update (Aug 27):
Tris is no longer available in the App Store, if you click on the iTunes link above you get the following error message:
"The item you’ve requested is not currently available"
Thanks user, yosi and Ahsan for the tip.
If you are one of those lucky ones to have downloaded and installed Tris on your iPhone then please note it will not get deleted.
[Touch Arcade via Two Finger Play]
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