The Tetris Company
The Tetris® brand logo
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| Limited liability company | |
| Industry | Interactive entertainment |
| Founder | |
| Headquarters | Honolulu, Hawaii, US |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Services | Licensor of the Tetris brand |
| Owner | Tetris Holding, LLC (50%) Blue Planet Software (50%) |
| Website | www |
The Tetris Company, LLC (TTC) is based in Hawaii and is owned by Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov. The company is the exclusive licensee of Tetris Holding LLC, the company that owns Tetris rights worldwide and the Tetris Company licenses the Tetris brand to third parties.
Tetris, originally conceived by Alexey Pajitnov, is widely considered one of the most popular games ever released, which was reflected by its mobile edition being the top seller in the industry in 2006. The Tetris Company licenses the Tetris trademark (including trade dress aspects) to video game development companies and maintains a set of guidelines that each licensed game must meet (such as the button controls for game functions must be consistent), and has copyrighted and trademarked every aspect of the game, such as the playfield dimensions, the shapes of the blocks, and the next piece, so that only they can make Tetris games.
Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG) was the Soviet agency, and later, privatized Russian company initially created to license state owned software and hardware to private industry. Initially, ELORG was a partner in The Tetris Company, and at one point was a 50 percent owner until Rogers and Pajitnov bought ELORG's remaining rights around 2005. Tetris Holding, a newly created company into which Pajitnov placed his Tetris rights and Rogers' Blue Planet Software company each own 50 percent of The Tetris Company who is now the issuer for all Tetris licenses.
TTC drew attention in the late 1990s when it attempted to remove freeware and shareware versions of Tetris from the market by sending out cease-and-desist letters claiming both trademark and copyright infringement, having copyrighted and trademarked every aspect of Tetris, such as the playfield dimensions, the next piece, and the shapes of the blocks. Creators of Tetris clones claimed that the company had no valid legal basis to restrict tetromino games that did not infringe on the Tetris name trademark, since copyright "look-and-feel" suits have not stood up in court in the past (Lotus v. Borland), and because the letters made no patent claims.
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