Apple defeats tech writer’s copyright lawsuit over ‘Tetris’ movie

U.S. District Judge Katherine Failla sai, opens new tab that the book and the movie were not similar enough to support Ackerman's allegations.

Ackerman's attorney Kevin Landau said in a statement that the decision was "flawed" and that he would appeal. Spokespeople and an attorney for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Tetris Company, which owns the rights to the game and was also a defendant, did not immediately respond to a similar request.

Ackerman's "The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World" was published in 2016. The book describes the Soviet history of the popular puzzle game and the fight for its global licensing rights as a "Cold War thriller with a political intrigue angle," according to the lawsuit.

Ackerman said he sent a pre-publication copy of the book to the Tetris Company earlier that year. He said the company refused to license its intellectual property for projects related to his book, dissuading film producers from adapting it, and sent him a "strongly worded cease and desist letter."

According to the complaint, the company's CEO Maya Rogers and screenwriter Noah Pink began copying Ackerman's book for the "Tetris" screenplay in 2017. "Tetris" was released in 2023 on the Apple TV platform. Ackerman sued Apple and the Tetris Company for copyright infringement later that year.

Failla dismissed Ackerman's case on Thursday, finding that the works' similarities were largely based on the same uncopyrightable facts about Tetris' history.

"Since Plaintiff's Book is a work of non-fiction, Defendants were entitled to use the facts contained in his Book in the making of their Film, so long as they did not copy his unique expression of those facts," Failla said.