Doodle Jump creator backs down

The creator of Doodle Jump has explained its attempt to keep similarly titled games out of the App Store and asked Apple to retract its cease-or-desist demands against competing developers.

Earlier this week, developers behind games like Doodle Hockey and Doodle Monster received warnings from Apple that they were violating Doodle Jump developer Lima Sky's intellectual property rights.

In the face of considerable outcry from both gamers and the developer community, Lima Sky boss Igor Pusenjak has issued an explanation, insisting his motives have been misunderstood.

"First, I've instructed my lawyer to contact Apple today to withdraw the notice," Pusenjak told PocketGamer.

"The notice overreached in asking Apple to remove the games and named some games that probably should not have been singled out.

"We never intended to have those games removed from the App Store, only to insist that infringing elements from those games (i.e. a title that infringes our trademark or a character that infringes our copyright) be changed. And we have made this clear to every developer who has contacted us - you don't need to take your game down, but you need to change the infringing elements.

"So, if the name of your game is so close to Doodle Jump that people think Lima Sky created it, we are asking you to change that. If you copied characters from Doodle Jump, we are asking you to change those."

Elsewhere in the lengthy statement, he insisted that there had been "no rush" to use the 'Doodle' prefix before his game came out and that subsequently some titles had undoubtedly been trading off the success of Doodle Jump – for which he owns a trademark. The law, Pusenjak explained, demands that he protects that trademark.

He claimed that Accelarato was attempting to trademark the term off the back of his own game – Doodle Hockey – and it was this action that encouraged Pusenjak to get aggressive.

"Accelerato's Bryan Duke, and many of you, are ridiculing me for attempting to trademark the word 'Doodle.' But such is trademark law. Apple has a trademark on a name of a fruit (Apple); a number of companies have trademarks on the word 'Memory'; and Facebook is asking for a trademark on 'Face'.

"Yeah, when you think about it, it sounds crazy. But if you actually read something about trademark law it starts to make some sense. It doesn't mean you cannot say 'apple' or 'memory' or 'face', or that we don't want you to say or use the word 'doodle', or doodled graphics in your game(s). It is there to protect companies from customer confusion and from having people make knock-offs."

"At the end of the day, I am a game developer, just like many of you," he concluded. "I want to spend my days creating great games, and not dealing with the legal issues."