Correct. Solomon Golomb described polyominoes, including the seven four square tetrominoes, in a 1953 talk to the Harvard Mathematics Club and published them in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1954. Martin Gardner's Scientific American columns made them a parlor staple by the end of the decade. Pajitnov has said for years that a pentomino puzzle was his starting point, so the borrowing was never secret. Mailland's target is The Tetris Company's marketing, which presents the shapes as original to the game.

The excerpt calls Golomb a "famed Caltech mathematician." In 1953 he was a Harvard graduate student. His Caltech connection came later, through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he spent most of his career at USC.

Pajitnov worked at the Computing Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow and wrote the first version on an Elektronika 60 in 1984. Soviet research institutes with serious computers had security oversight as a matter of course, and the Centre did work on artificial intelligence and speech recognition.

"Tightly controlled by the KGB" is doing a lot of work in a sentence with no citation behind it. It is plausible in the general sense that every Soviet institution was watched. The excerpt offers nothing specific to this lab or this game. The book may. The excerpt does not.

Gerasimov, a sixteen year old at the Centre, wrote the IBM PC version. That port spread across Moscow on floppy disks within weeks and then across the Eastern bloc, which is how the game got far enough west to be sold. Early accounts, including Pajitnov's own, credit him.

Mailland goes further. He says Pajitnov credited Gerasimov under oath in a U.S. court and later testified, also under oath, that he was the sole author, and that Rogers removed Gerasimov from the credits of the Famicom version. These are serious, specific charges. The excerpt does not cite the cases or the cartridge. If the book does, this card turns green.

Nikolai Belikov ran the Tetris file at Elorg, the Soviet bureau that licensed computer exports, and he negotiated the 1989 deals with Rogers, Stein and Maxwell's Mirrorsoft. After the Soviet collapse Elorg was privatized and stayed a partner in The Tetris Company until Rogers and Pajitnov bought out its remaining interest in the mid 2000s.

The $15 million figure, the shell companies in Delaware, the Caymans, the Bahamas and Africa, and the $200,000 Panamanian passport all appear in the excerpt without a source. None of it surfaced in public reporting I could find. It may come from court filings or interviews in the book. Until then it is the most colorful paragraph in the piece and the least supported.

In Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive (D.N.J., May 30, 2012), Judge Freda Wolfson ruled against a company that had cloned Tetris for the iPhone almost pixel for pixel. She was explicit that copyright cannot protect "the idea of vertically falling blocks," rotating them, or clearing lines. What she protected was the particular expression, taken together. The 20 by 10 board, the shadow piece showing where a block will land, the next piece preview, the colors, the garbage lines and the screen filling at game over. A permanent injunction followed in 2013.

There are only seven tetrominoes. Once a court protects their look on a board of standard size, the space left for a competitor is narrow. Some commentators have argued the ruling stretched the line between idea and expression. That is a fair critique. "Granted copyright protection to geometric forms" is a different claim, and the opinion says the opposite.