The case of the identical rabbit games

This is a pretty straightforward case of copyright and perhaps trademark infringement; I would be pissed off if I were Wolfire, too, but the reality is, they just need to send a DMCA takedown notice if someone's infringing on the Lugaru trademark or copyright on the levels / game data.<p>If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff developers.<p>Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.

I haven't downloaded either of them, but at least on the App store page, iCoder's Lugaru isn't accompanied "with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange." iCoder's response in the article seems like a slightly more coherent version of "if it's on the internet it's in the public domain."<p>An earlier version of paolomaffei's comment also pointed out that the original post says that only the code is GPL2, and the game assets are not to be resold without permission.

<a href="http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source" rel="nofollow">http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source</a>

This is a shame, I bought this game as part of the Indy Bundle and really enjoyed it.<p>What Matlin is doing is defiantly unethical but if it's illegal (thanks to the distribution of the media) then it sounds like Apple aren't doing enough for the hefty cut they're taking.