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# Falling blocks got the White House a copyright threat
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/falling-blocks-got-the-white-house-a-copyright-threat/
- Published: 2026-09-28T19:14:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T19:15:10.000Z
- Description: Build the Wall vanished from arcade.gov days after The Tetris Company's warning.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: News, Tetris, Copyright, politics, law, intellectual property, Game Studies

On September 3, the White House launched arcade.gov, a page of five MAGA-themed browser games. One of them, *Build the Wall*, was a near-exact *Tetris* clone that asked players to "protect the border from the coming horde." The Tetris Company answered [on X](https://x.com/Tetris%5FOfficial/status/2095933372019216384?ref=killscreen.com): "We take copyright infringement very seriously." Four days later the game disappeared from the site without explanation. That much made the news everywhere.

The reason it belongs here is [the essay Julien Mailland published at the MIT Press Reader](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bizarre-murky-history-of-soviet-born-tetris/?ref=killscreen.com), which [the publisher's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddq%5Fu6iDAcy/?ref=killscreen.com) pointed me to this week. Mailland, a media law professor and author of *Soviet Blocks*, uses the takedown to reopen a question courts got wrong: whether anyone can own falling blocks at all. The mathematician Solomon Golomb described the tetromino shapes in 1953 and popularized them in Scientific American, decades before *Tetris* existed. The Tetris Company's power to police them rests on a 2012 ruling, *Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive*, that effectively extended copyright to elementary geometry. As Mailland puts it, if the shapes were copyrightable, Golomb would be the holder, and *Tetris* itself would be the infringement.

The deeper history is stranger: a game coded in a KGB-adjacent Soviet lab, spread as samizdat on floppy disks precisely because no property regime applied to it, later fenced in by offshore shells and rewritten credits that erased co-programmer Vadim Gerasimov. We covered [the fight over *Tetris*' copyright](https://www.killscreen.com/fight-over-tetris-copyright-and-its-implications-gamings-future/) years ago; the argument has not aged a day.

A propaganda clone removed by a copyright empire built on a freeware folk object: nobody in this story owns the moral high ground, and Golomb owns the shapes.

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