Sad news coming from one of the iPhone developers accepted into Apple's iPhone Dev Program. Noah Witherspoon, a college student, and the guy behind Tris (one of the many free apps available on the App Store), has announced he'll be pulling his Tetris clone from the venue on Aug 27 (tomorrow). The reason? Legal threats from the actual Tetris Company.

Noah took some time to properly announce being forced to pull the free Tetris clone from Apple's iTunes App Store, and wrote a few lines to his fans, on Two Finger Play. We've posted some excerpts for you below.

Over, for now

Well - I've received notice from Apple that they've been contacted by The Tetris® Company about Tris. That, I'm afraid, is essentially game over. Do they have a case? No. Not really. I am convinced that if it went to court, the "copyright" claim would get thrown out completely. The trademark, perhaps not - but if I changed the name, to e.g. "Trys", that would be much harder for them to argue.

The trouble is, I'm a college student, and not an affluent one, and I simply do not have the time, energy, or resources to fight this battle right now. [...] Thus, it's with great sadness that I must announce that I'll be pulling Tris from the App Store on Wednesday, August 27th, to remain in Apple's systems but publicly unavailable until I work out a solution to this.

The developer admits that he does not believe The Tetris Company considers it is acting in bad faith, and that, in its own way, it is protecting company interests. Still, Noah claims the approach is consistent with that of "petty bullying", adding that when he finds the time, and "a good copyright lawyer", he'll be considering taking the appropriate steps to get Tris back online.

All this being said, you have just under a day (starting now) to download your free Tetris clone, known as Tris. The game is available on the App Store here, and it works on iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod touch running firmware 2.0 or later.

Tell us if you've managed to snag Tris in time, or share an impression about this rather sad story.