This is a pretty straightforward case of copyright and perhaps trademark infringement; I would be pissed off if I were Wolfire, too, but the reality is, they just need to send a DMCA takedown notice if someone's infringing on the Lugaru trademark or copyright on the levels / game data.
If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff developers.
Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.
Agreed. What bugs me about Rosen's statement is that he seems to expect Apple to police this for him, and that's not something they can or should do. He's within his rights to send Apple a DMCA takedown and they'll respond to it, as they have done in the past (for example, in the case of VLC for iPad)
Why not? They provide a lot of other policing work, like use of wrong APIs, style violations, rejecting your app because there are already enough apps of that kind and you added nothing new, and all kinds of things way more fiddly than wholesale copying. They're taking a nice cut, they ought to be bringing the customer and developers some value for it. Isn't that the whole Apple Store value proposition?
What Apple does is curate the store to their standards, which makes them the decision makers on what is and is not acceptable. Copyright is a large and nuanced legal issue in which they can't be the final arbiter, so why would they want to expose themselves to that hassle? This exact issue is a great example: according to the "copiers", they have a legal right to release the app. Whether or not they do is not up to Apple to decide.
The whole point of the DMCA takedown process (for better or for worse) is to remove the burden of investigating the validity of copyright claims from distribution services. It's one thing to judge app quality; it's another thing altogether when two people submit essentially the same app, and disagree over who actually created it.
If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff developers.
Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.