Tech writer sues Apple, claiming Tetris movie ripped off his ‘Cold War thriller’ book

polygon.com:

Tech journalist Dan Ackerman claims Apple’s movie Tetris ripped off his 2016 book, The Tetris Effect, and is suing Apple, the movie’s producers and screenwriter, and the Tetris Company itself for millions of dollars in damages.

Attorneys for Ackerman — who is editor-in-chief of the tech website Gizmodo — filed a suit in New York federal court on Monday, claiming The Tetris Company, its CEO Maya Rogers, and the screenwriter Noah Pink adapted his book without his consent. The suit also names Apple as the distributor of the movie, and several production companies involved in the making of the film, as defendants.

Tetris tells the story of how Alexey Pajitnov’s classic puzzle game, created in Soviet Russia, came to be popularized in the West. It focuses on Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton in the movie), the Dutch-American entrepreneur who was instrumental in securing the rights for the game for Nintendo’s Game Boy version in a 1989 wrangle with Soviet authorities that also involved shady British media mogul Robert Maxwell, among others.

This is the story told in Ackerman’s book, too — though he was hardly the first to tell it. Among many other examples, the events formed a memorable climax for David Sheff’s classic 1993 book about Nintendo’s rise in the 1980s, Game Over; were compellingly told in a 2004 BBC TV documentary, Tetris: From Russia With Love; and figured in Box Brown’s 2016 graphic novel, Tetris: The Games People Play.

Ackerman’s suit rests on three main claims. The first is that it was his invention to frame the story as a “Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle,” in the lawsuit’s words, with Henk Rogers as the “heroic protagonist.” The second is that the way the film tells the story is, scene by