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On the other hand, we want to award innovation at companies, big or small, that create new ideas rather than simply following the trend of cloning whatever game or idea is popular.
![wolfenstein 2 courtroom wolfenstein 2 courtroom](https://icdn.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/wolfenstein-ii_-the-new-colossus_20171026135603-1500x844.jpg)
If too much copyright protection is awarded to a game developer, then it could end up owning an entire genre and shutting out creativity for decades. If the developers of Wolfenstein 3-D were able to monopolize the idea of the first person perspective of a protagonist winding through levels using guns and other weapons to destroy enemies, then we wouldn't have Halo or Call of Duty. On the one hand, a developer shouldn't retain a monopoly over an entire genre of games, since it can serve as a platform for third party creativity. There has always been a fine line between innovation and shameless copying in the video game industry. Courts are suddenly more willing to aggressively apply the principles of copyright infringement to the age-old practice of borrowing the game mechanics from an already successful video game, changing the art and design, and presenting it as something new and different - i.e., "cloning".
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How courts treat developers copying ideas for video games, however, has quietly but dramatically evolved over the past year. From the earliest days of the wave of Pong clones in 1976, copyright law has been rather ineffective for video game developers who have tried using it to protect their games from competition. In that sense, all of creativity is derivative. Nothing can be wholly original when every idea and expression is inspired by what came before it.