“Your move, Mark.”

EA announces they are suing Zynga for copyright infringement, claims “The Ville” is a clone of Maxis’ “The Sims Social”.

This is kinda a big deal. Zynga’s somewhat loose respect for intellectual property of game design has been an open secret for quite some time. Now it’s going to be legally tested. To quote EA’s unusually well-crafted public statement on the matter:

Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product.  But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it.

Or Zynga is going to give EA a LOT of money. Which at the moment is not a pleasant prospect.

Zynga’s response: “noobs”

It’s unfortunate that EA thought that this was an appropriate response to our game, and clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles. It’s also ironic that EA brings this suit shortly after launching SimCity Social which bears an uncanny resemblance to Zynga’s CityVille game.

If you’d like to be Armchair Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, the actual complaint is here.

‘I HAVE ALL THE COINS!!‘ (mirror)

Needless to say, people who’ve *actually* dealt with online game players found this entirely too amusing.

"And this is the move I used to choke our VP of Marketing when he suggested I take a Tabula Rasa memory stick into space."

Richard Garriott wants you to know he is very aware of social gaming. Specifically, that it kind of sucks.

What’s interesting is that there are a few companies that are making real money in a big way so they deserve their high valuation by all means. And they’ve not only led the charge but they are evolving quickly and they’re doing a brilliant job of it. I have respect and admiration for my already titanic competitors that are ahead of me.That being said, there’s tonnes of small start-ups who we are seeing take lots of investment and lots of activity and large acquisition costs – who are creating, literally, junk. Stuff that people aren’t playing that much and if you play it, it’s not much fun. But it does show you there are investors desperate to find a foothold in this market.

Translation: “Mark Pincus? I totally wasn’t talking about you. Call me. *wink*”

Of course, the gameoblogospherezoidthing is all aflutter over Garriott mentioning the words Ultima and Online in the same sentence.

If you dissect it further, Ultima Online included farming, running shops, fighting monsters, pets – and what kind of games are popular on social networks right now? They’re all dissections of what I’ve already done throughout the Ultima series. One of the things I’m really excited about is that these games are already popular with an audience ten times bigger than the MMO audience, that now covers all ages, all genders and all walks of life. I already know how to do those games.

“No, really, Mark. I’m serious. CALL ME.”

As soon as we have a game where you can have an avatar with a house and a room to display the cool things you’ve collected we can ship it. And then tomorrow you can fight monsters, and a month after than you can have some weapons and armour, and a month after that you can build swords… That will still allow us to come out with a full in-depth Lord British experience, but begin the journey as light as makes a confident, interactive game.

“Screw it, let’s just ship something once we get a paperdoll up and running. THEN Mark will call me.”

Entirely appropriate illustration from Toothpaste For Dinner

Farmville and other games by Zynga, LOLapps, and other big names in social gaming collect your personal information – and the personal information of everyone on your friends list – and then turn around and sells it to data enrichment firms.

Yeah, this can’t be bad at all!

The most expansive use of Facebook user information uncovered by the Journal involved RapLeaf. The San Francisco company compiles and sells profiles of individuals based in part on their online activities.

The Journal found that some LOLapps applications, as well as the Family Tree application, were transmitting users’ Facebook ID numbers to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then linked those ID numbers to dossiers it had previously assembled on those individuals, according to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then embedded that information in an Internet-tracking file known as a “cookie.”

RapLeaf says it strips out the user’s name when it embeds the information in the cookie and shares that information for ad targeting. However, The Wall Street Journal found that RapLeaf transmitted Facebook user IDs to a dozen other advertising and data firms, including Google Inc.’s Invite Media.

RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found.

RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf.

Well, as long as they didn’t mean it!

Is it just me who yearns for those halcyon, innocent days of three years ago or so when the worst moral challenges we faced in the online sphere were gold farmers sending you badly spelled IMs?

Because now it appears the sleaze is making more money than the games they leech from.

(Hat tip: Popehat)