The makers of Candy Crush Saga have issued a lengthy defense of their actions, with regard to a couple of notorious trademark applications and allegations it deliberately cloned a game whose makers reached a deal with another publisher.

In the world of flash games, derivatives vastly outnumber original concepts, so the charge someone copied a game is quite common. But the makers of a Pac-Man-style game in 2009 say they have an email proving that King, the outfit trademarking words like "candy" and "saga," ordered a developer to directly copy their…