BTW, the criteria used here as to whether something is a copy or not is way too specific. Who gives a crap if the tardigrade is blue or gray? It's still a tardigrade. Every minute surface detail does not have to be identical for something to be a ripoff. Changing a name of something that is, underneath it all, the same thing, is by definition a ripoff.
Nobody said the color by itself means anything. The reason it keeps being discussed is because people keep throwing it out there as 'proof' that Discovery's tardigrade is almost exactly the same as the game's. Which is obviously laughable because the two obviously aren't the same color at all.
And the fact that it's a tardigrade is incidentally also completely worthless in this discussion because tardigrades are real animals. No one gets to claim credit for the idea of using a tardigrade, anymore than for the idea of using a dog or an elephant.
The only relevant discussion here is the combination of "Man-sized" + "FTL travel". And it is fair enough to say that that combination seems possibly suspicious, raises an eyebrow, etc. But it is patently ridiculous to claim that that combination by itself proves anything whatsoever. Especially in light of the fact that the first half has clear, documented provenance (the giant sized tardigrade was conceived as a full-time crew member of the ship - so it would obviously have to be giant sized) and is a direct outgrowth of the decades old sci-fi trope of enlarging tiny creatures anyway (see Them!, Honey I shrunk the Kids franchise, Ant-man, Arachnophobia, and, you know, that *Star Trek* episode with the giant amoeba, and also the Star Trek movie with the super-evolved microbes, etc).
And the same documentation also logically leads to the second half of that equation, too. Because the Tardigrade was too expensive to keep around as a permanent crew member, they had to reconfigure its role in the show but wished to keep it in the same thematic role. So if it couldn't be the actual navigator, then it obviously had to be involved in the mechanical process of navigation. And in order for that to be necessary, it had to have unique capabilities that were relevant to the special drive system.
At the end of the day it is only the *expression* of the idea that is protected at all, and even then only if there is clear evidence that CBS probably didn't come up with the idea separately from the guy who made the game. Comparing the expression between the two, you have enlarged tardigrades with a significantly different appearance (clearly different features and a clearly different color), one is floating in space and teleports itself away (Seriously, that's the only time in DSC when we ever see the Tardigrade actually use FTL travel) and the other is floating in space, grabs a dude, makes him disappear using a transporter effect and then just floats off through space.
That is not a case of Mr. Spock vs Mr Rock. And even if we all agreed it was that close, the actual evidence we've seen strongly suggests that CBS was working towards the idea naturally to begin with and likely didn't even know this game existed, anyway.
.... but that doesn't change one of the basic tenets of our system of laws.
