There were lots of “lifts” between magazines, sometimes direct, sometimes with variations. Amstrad Action July 1992 has a very close variant (adds a high score table) of Star Dodger, written for ACU September 1988. Star Dodger is itself a clone of Asterisk Tracker, a BBC BASIC one-liner published in BEEBUG magazine in December 1984.
I remember typing in that Star Dodger from AA back in the day and having a lot of fun with it, without really knowing about the original game from ACU, though I always wondered why it had v2. Apart from the Hi-score Table which is a nice addition to the game, I think the only other difference is the Asterisks are now Green.
I'd like to try that BBC BASIC one-liner though, just to see how it goes with BBC BASIC for the CPC.
Type-ins and articles for ACU were published on an "all rights" basis: you transferred all rights (except for moral right, which includes the right to be recognized as the author) internationally forever in exchange for payment. I'm pretty sure that Future Publishing had the same terms, though I have more memories of sending the rights slips back to Adlington every month so I could get paid.
The Star Dodger game created a situation where coders were adapting other peoples programmes, I'm unsure if anyone pulled up on that programme either, though it pretty much created a series of circumstances where people modify existing programmes and sent them to AA. Another controversial game being
Parrot from AA102 Type-ins which came out of an early book (Sensational Games for the Amstrad CPC464), however the game AA published, had been modified to run in MODE 1, which on inspection with the original game took quite a bit of modifying in the code. I guess if the author had changed the Graphics to something else and retitled the game, it may had never of been suspected of being lifted.