Atari accuses Nestle for blatant copyright violations involving the game Breakout

**Atari** today launched a lawsuit against Swiss food company Nestle for a blatantly flouting copyright rules. The company was accused of using content from Atari’s 1970s classic game, Breakout in a television advertisement aimed at selling the KitKat brand. [caption id=“attachment_3958773” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representative Image[/caption] According to a report in the Financial Times, the lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco court last Thursday for damaging Atari’s reputation on social platforms by exploiting the name, look and feel of Breakout. According to Jonathan Stempel’s report on Reuters, Atari stated in its complaint saying that Nestle tried to lure potential customers such as — “nostalgic Baby Boomers, Generation X, and even today’s Millennial and post-Millennial ‘gamers.’” According to a report by The Guardian, Atari stated,“Nestlé simply took the classic Breakout screen, replaced its bricks with KitKat bars, and invited customers to ‘breakout’ and buy more candy bars.” The game which was created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak along with fellow co-founder Steve Jobs is currently distributed as ‘Breakout: Boost’ after several expansions on the **Apple** App Store. The game was created as a successor to another classic title, Pong and requires a player to knockdown rows of colored bricks with a paddle. A spokeswoman for Nestle UK, however, responded to the lawsuit stating that the company was aware of the lawsuit in the US and that it would be ready to fight off the allegations.“This is a UK TV advert that ran in 2016. The ad no longer runs and we have no current plans to rerun it," said the spokeswoman. Atari is seeking three times Nestle’s profits from the alleged infringement along with triple and punitive damages.