The authors of S tarcraft and Diablo sued the Chinese mobile company Lilith Games, accusing it of borrowing characters and setting from World of Warcarft. The piquancy of the situation lies in the fact that Lilith Games sued uCool, which cloned (and possibly borrowed the source code) Soul Clash during the development of Heroes Charge.
This Monday, Blizzard announced that Soul Clash (aka Dot Arena, aka AllStar Heroes) violated its copyrights by using elements from the Warcraft and Worldof Warcraft games in the game, PC Gamer informs.Americans were most likely confused by the presence of characters in the Chinese game that visually closely resemble units and heroes from games in the Warcraft universe.
So far, Blizzard has appealed to the court only in Taiwan, but, as our colleagues report, reserves the right to continue further proceedings in mainland China.
The funniest thing, as we have already noted in the lead, is that the Shanghai residents themselves recently sued the American company uCool, which, according to their version, violated the license rights in relation to Soul Clash, they say, there are the same characters (!), and the user interface, and the rules, and even the program code is the same.
With the apparent similarity of cases, Blizzard‘s position is much more shaky. And if from a legal point of view — not everything is unambiguous here, then from a universal point of view — questions arise. The fact is that when creating the Warcraft series, Blizzard was once inspired by the setting of Warhammer board games. Now, of course, visually the series has gone far from the original source, but the first part of the famous RTS in spirit was very close to the dark universe of the “Warhammer”.
Also on the topic: The creators of Heroes Charge were accused of theft