The multiplayer online video game World of Tanks broke its own Guinness World Record for Most Players Online Simultaneously on one MMO Server in April 2012 when more than 305,000 players were on a European server. At the end of last year, the game had 45 million registered players worldwide. The popularity inevitably led to imitators, but the computer and video game blog GamePolitics reported on May 9 that World of Tanks developer and publisher Wargaming.net LLP filed a lawsuit against Changyou.com and Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co., the makers of Project Tank. The lawsuit alleges that Chinese companies “stole” Wargaming’s intellectual property to create a game that is “disturbingly similar” to World of Tanks.
The Project Tank developers issued a statement on the company’s website accusing Wargaming of launching “a series of underhand actions” against the video game. “Continuously sabotaged by Wargaming, Project Tank and Gamebox have never intended to pose a threat or compete at any platform with World of Tanks,” the statement said. “The graphics used in Project Tank are our efforts to reconstruct WWII battle scenes. We feel truly shocked and bullied by Wargaming, a giant company of the gaming industry who is apparently “threatened” by a closed beta phase browser game aiming to provide a cheaper, fairer and more accessible war game to players around the world.”
This interesting case calls attention to international issues involving copyright infringement. Los Angeles business litigation attorney Robert G. Klein has more than 25 years of experience handling complex intellectual property issues, and you can use the form on this page or contact our firm at [number] to have our Los Angeles copyright infringement lawyer review your case if you need legal assistance with a copyright dispute.
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The USPTO says there’s no such thing as “international copyright”;