Basically the way I feel right now is that any employee associated with Zynga is just as much a slimy douchebag as is Pincus.

Basically, I read the memo to say: "We're thieves and I'm okay with that. If you want to work with thieves, then Zynga is the place for you."

Exactly. But what I am disheartened about more is that the general SV VC and Tech communities appear to be ok with that as well.

This sentence really spelled it out:

"We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality."

The evolution Pincus is justifying here is taking a known game and making it free, or social or (in his mind) higher quality.

He is admitting right there to effectively "We evolve games by stealing them and making them work on our facebook delivery platform"

And calls it "innovation"

That is plain despicable.

Anecdotal, but many of the people I've met in the SV tech community don't respect Zynga at all.

Let's make that statement only a hair more general:

> We evolve genres by making [apps] free, ..., accessible, and highest quality.

This is arguably what Internet Explorer did to Netscape. The "genre" of web browsers did, in fact, evolve quite a bit in response.

Competition in an application space is good. Even in games. Look at how many tower defense or match-3 games there are. If you can make a better one, I'll play it.

Case in point, Zynga's "Words With Friends". It is the best version of online Scrabble I've played.

(Apparently it was developed by Newtoy and acquired by Zynga. And in my humble opinion, Zynga's "improvements" over the past year have had nothing to do with "evolving high quality", but are fairly blatant attempts to wrangle cash and facebook information out of me. But that's another story.)

However if you make a feature-by-feature copy of GemCraft, I'm not going to think much of you. And that seems to be what Zynga did here. They didn't build a better mousetrap, they build the exact same mousetrap and used their market position to grift Nimblebit's success.

I disagree with the comparison; IE to NS was ONE app.

This is an industry of blatant copying.

The "genre" you speak of is so shallow - whereas the "genre" of online/mobile games is a fucking galaxy by comparison.

Whenever I hear "higher quality" with no explanation of where or how that higher quality comes about my BS radar immediately starts going off. "Adding value" and "evolving" and "making X higher quality" are all phrases that have recently begun to lose all meaning and now sound like cliche corporate bullshit. Explain the how/where and I'll believe. Oh, and it's very easily to tell when you're being sincere so if a company uses it they'd better mean it or not say it at all.

I wonder whether it's something that only benefits from the economies of scale available to money. That is, can entrepreneurs benefit from copying? Is it democratic?

I'm not sure it's that black & white. I don't love the argument I'm about to make, so feel free to counter it:

The only tangible I can sense with content (code, media, etc) is how it's provided, and that means that service is the entirety of our business. Zynga isn't producing original content, but they are producing a valuable service. Do I think it's ethical? No way. But should it be illegal? Not unless you want to limit how we can use data.

Certainly the world is full of things which are wrong, but should not be illegal because the "solution" would be worse than the problem it tried to solve. (coughSOPA/PIPAcough)

In this case, what Zynga is doing is copying game design. And in a perfect world...I think it should be perfectly legal to copy game design, because the alternative is software patents, and do I really need to spell out why that sucks?

But it's still ethically and morally wrong, and we should name and shame Zynga, their developers, and their enablers. How about a boycott of Amazon until they yank Zynga's hosting? (And yes, I realize their isn't the slightest hope of such a thing...)

I don't think the only alternative is software patents; if the copying is close enough, it can infringe copyright as well. For example, some novelists have lost lawsuits over cloning novels, when they wrote knock-off versions that came way too close to the originals. You can write a parody of Dune, for example, because parody/satire is separately protected, and you can rip off the basic premise (a book about a desert planet with spice and giant worms, etc.), because that can't be patented. But you can't write a direct, scene-for-scene ripoff with a 1:1 correspondence of characters and action, even if you didn't literally copy the prose in doing so.

How about Facebook? I was among those applauding "The Hacker Way" earlier today, and their manifesto of making money in order to build a better service [http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2012/02/hacker-way.html], but Zynga makes up 12% of Facebook's revenue!

You're absolutely right, copying creative ideas is not illegal, and making it illegal wouldn't solve anything. Unfortunately, the reality is that as long as it is possible to make make money by operating unethically (read: forever), businesses will do it.

Call me naive, but I would at least like to believe that these types of practices cannot sustain a business forver, and eventually a player who does things the right way will win out.

would it be fair to draw an analogy to the London bus on a bridge photo story from a short while back?

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWPCC/2012/1.html