The White House deleted a Tetris-style browser game called 'Build The Wall' from its website days after The Tetris Company publicly objected to the unauthorized use of its game mechanics and look. The company said on X it had no involvement in creating the game and takes copyright infringement seriously. The White House has not explained the removal or responded to media inquiries.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-09-09
The White House removed a browser game called 'Build the Wall' from its website after the Tetris Company said it had no involvement in the title and takes copyright infringement seriously. The game, which used block-stacking mechanics resembling Tetris, tasked players with building a wall to stop a 'zombie border siege' and drew criticism for its racist framing. The page now returns a 404 error, though another game on the site, Rio Run, which involves deporting immigrant characters, remains live.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-08
The White House has taken down Build the Wall, a browser game styled after Tetris that had players stack bricks to construct a border wall, from its online arcade. The removal followed public criticism from The Tetris Company, which said it had no involvement in the game and cited copyright concerns over its close resemblance to Tetris.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-08
The White House quietly removed 'Build the Wall,' a Tetris-inspired browser game from its new WhiteHouse.gov 'Arcade' section, after The Tetris Company publicly disavowed the game and warned it takes copyright infringement seriously. The game had players stack border-wall bricks to block pixelated 'zombies' representing migrants, but unlike real Tetris, completed lines never cleared, making every round end in a 'Border Breached' message. Other games in the same arcade, modeled on Flappy Bird and Snake, remain live.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-08
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their journalism was used without permission to train AI models and is often reproduced verbatim in chatbot responses. Microsoft was named as a defendant because its Copilot tool relies on OpenAI's technology, and the outlets are seeking destruction of any copied works, datasets, and models built from them.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-06
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging their journalism was used without permission to train AI models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The suit claims these tools consume original reporting and generate imitative outputs that could financially undermine the news organizations that created the source material.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-05
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies scraped their copyrighted articles, bypassing paywalls, to train generative AI models. The publishers claim this practice has hurt their revenue by diverting readers to AI-generated summaries and has produced false information wrongly attributed to their outlets.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-05
Sony Music and Warner filed a lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday, alleging the AI company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics and compositions without permission. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data, potentially totaling billions in damages, and cite songs like 'Livin' on a Prayer' and 'Hallelujah' among the works allegedly used.
futurism.com
· 2026-08-31