(which is still ruining my life, thank you very much), lots of readers wrote in to let me know that the puzzle game is hardly new. Indeed, 2048 looks a lot like the popular mobile game called Threes , complete with one frustrating grid and a series of numbered blocks that players must push together to form escalating multiples.

The uncanny resemblance was not lost on Gabriele Cirulli, creator of 2048. Beneath the game board on the browser version of the game, he acknowledged that it was "conceptually similar to Threes." (In fact, the developers themselves have publicly vented their frustration.) And now the App Store is full of 2048 clones, just as it was full of Threes clones before that and Flappy Bird clones before that.

But where do you draw the line between a borrowed idea and a stolen one? And when does "conceptual similarity" turn into copyright infringement?

"The first thing you have to understand about copyright law is that you can protect the expression of an idea, but you cannot protect the idea itself," says Tom Buscaglia, Game Attorney, who specializes in video game law. For game developers, this means that you can copyright graphics, names, and other specific elements of your game (the expression of an idea), but you cannot reserve rights over the basic rules of gameplay (the idea itself).

For board games, the law is simple enough. "You can copyright the game board, but not how the game is played," Buscaglia says. For example, even though only Hasbro can use the Monopoly board and Rich Uncle Pennybags, anyone is free to create their own board game that involves landing on square spaces and buying up properties.

In video game law, the same general rules apply. "You can basically copyright images and graphics," Buscaglia says. "And an exact copy of one part of the game is probably infringing." But the law does not usually protect a game's rules, controls, or functionality, which explains in part why there are hundreds of Tetris and Bejeweled rip-offs with hardly any lawsuits brought against them.

What about 2048—could it be that my latest gaming addiction is infringing on Threes? Buscaglia doesn't think so. "What they have in common is a grid that contains numbers that can be moved vertically or horizontally," he says. "Is it similar? Absolutely. Is it the same? No." It was a close call, though: Had Cirulli borrowed the font or box design from Threes, Buscaglia says that there could have been a lawsuit in the making.

So 2048 isn't officially a rip-off. It certainly seems wrong that the law protects artful copycats, but that doesn't mean you have to like it. Even Buscaglia, a video game lawyer, finds some fault in a legal system that won't protect game rules.

"It doesn't seem fair," he says. "Because I know how much brilliance goes into developing a unique set of rules."

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