While there's a good dose of justice in this particular case, the legal basis of the lawsuit (copyrighted elements rather than gameplay) doesn't seem to me to set a powerful precedent. Won't big companies still be able to clone games if they're just a little more careful about rewriting the copyrighted elements? And that's assuming the suit succeeds...

Edit: Actually, if clones are prevented from doing things like offering equivalent items for identical costs, it may cause them to differentiate themselves on a substantive gameplay level. That would be nice.

The root cause of so many of these "copycat" games is actually technological and staffing based, not legal. Developing for iOS and Flash requires different skill sets, so small studios are unable to develop for both, giving other companies time to snatch the iOS market.

There are some solutions for this:
1) Cross compile Flash and iOS (available from Adobe? http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html)
2) Hire Flash Devs who also know iOS development.
3) Begin work on iOS port early.
4) Don't release a game until the iOS version is already underway.

Of course, adding iOS development on top of Flash development essentially doubles the risk, unless you can minimize risk using cross compilation. Anyway, something for smaller dev companies to think about once they realize their elegant (read: simple and easy to copy) Flash game is a hit.

I feel for Spry Fox but I hope other companies can learn from this and plan ahead to avoid this.

Power to Spry Fox. Whether they win or not, it takes balls to put up the fight for what's right -- and if successful, maybe people will think twice about cloning successful indie works without improving on the product in any original way. It's bad for the industry, and it's bad for the morale of every game developer with a creative idea.

Fight on, Spry!

Legally, it's impossible to say what's "inspiration" versus plagiarism, which is why something like SpryFox suing 6waves is so rare. That line in the sand is a tough one to draw and everyone has a different idea of where it lies. I wrote a blog post about the line between "inspiring" and "copying", and would love to hear your comments on the issue: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/TylerYork/20120126/9304/What_happened_to_innovative_g
ames.php

You're going to see a lot of things like this popping up.

This is one of the scariest issues for an independent game studio like ours.

While I absolutely believe in the ideas of inspiration and derivative work, dealing with blatant plagiarism could be a dream killer. We don't get paralyzed by this fear, but as Spry Fox is seeing it's not unfounded.

How does a start-up like ours get support from the community if sharing our ideas could lead to someone else stealing them?

This is inevitable, games have always "copied" each other from the very beginning.. Companies will start to take legal action to "defend" their turf and eventually a body of cases will form a consensus of what is "ok" and what is "not" with regards to games. We have plenty of cases with regards to movies, music, software algorithms, books, etc.. This is the natural evolution of a medium. The only complication here is that games are cross genre, ie they encompass music, text, visual arts, software algorithms and design. What overlap on any would constitute plagiarism?

I just finished playing that two games and, like Tiny Tower and Dream Heights, Yeti Town is clearly a wholesale ripoff of Tiny Town. It's not quite as bad as Dream Heights (Yeti Town has a more pronounced aesthetic difference) but it's still pretty overt. Whether that is actionable based on their previous business agreements I can't say, but it's sounds sleazy at the very least. Question: I've actually never played a social game quite like this before, do either of these resemble any earlier games?