This news story got me thinking.

The story can be summed up as follows: The people who made the video game Crazy Taxi are suing the people who made the video game Simpsons: Road Rage because it is a blatant rip-off of the Crazy Taxi gameplay style. In fact, Sega claims to hold a patent on that gameplay style.

But if Road Rage uses completely different code, different graphics, different music, different art, and different characters, then its only provable similarity is the basic gameplay mechanic: driving cars and picking up passengers and delivering them to their destinations. And from one point of view, the gameplay mechanic is more or less the equivalent of a plot line in a movie.

First off, I question the validity of the patent they were granted for Crazy Taxi. You can't patent a plot line, can you?

But more importantly, even if they were deliberately copying the style of Crazy Taxi, there are many much more blatant examples of such rip-offs in many kinds of media, including video games and movies. How many Space Invaders rip-offs have you seen since Atari's original? How many first-person-shooter video games have been written since Wolfenstein and Doom? How many movies came out in the same year which were all about asteroids hitting the earth? How many books came out about boy wizards? How many identical-sounding rap songs about life as a gangsta are there on the radio today?

It made me remember the lawsuit that Huey Lewis and the News brought against the person who wrote the theme to Ghostbusters. If I recall correctly, it was alleged that the Ghostbusters theme was carefully crafted to be stylistically similar to I Want a New Drug when it was commissioned. They settled out of court, so no legal precedent got set with that case.

But where is the line drawn between plagiarizing a work, and merely trying to capitalize on a market that favors a certain style? As much as I hate "me-too" media, I don't see a problem with someone trying to grab a piece of market share by creating a similar but competing product.

Gets you to thinking about the nature of patents... Where's the line between a patent and a monopoly? A successful patent would shut out all your competition...

Discuss.