Wargaming still fails to advance in litigation with indie studio Press Fire Games (formerly known as BlitzTeam). Now the lawsuit against the former employees of the corporation was rejected by the District Court of California.
Battle PrimeUpdate:
The Wargaming company shared its position on the issue.
“As we noted earlier, the principled position of Wargaming is to protect its own rights within the framework of current legislation in various jurisdictions. At the moment, the California Court has decided that it has no jurisdiction over the stated claims, and therefore has not violated the consideration of the merits of our claims. Our claims against the other party have not been withdrawn (remain relevant), we plan to challenge this decision and achieve consideration of the case on the merits. If this fails to be done in the USA, we will continue to work on it in other jurisdictions, as we consider this precedent important, both for the protection of the rights of Wargaming in particular, and for the IT industry in general. I would also like to note that this decision is not a reason for the game to be returned to the Google Play Store.”
Original publication:
Briefly recall the essence of the conflict
The confrontation between the companies began to unfold in December 2019. Then Wargaming accused its five former employees who founded BlitzTeam of violating intellectual property and unfair competition.
Among the main claims are the placement of counterfeit DAVA Engine code by developers on GitHub, the creation of forks from these copies to their personal accounts and violation of the WOTB BLITZ trademark.
At the moment, Wargaming has managed to change the name of the studio from BlitzTeam to Press Fire Games and remove its mobile game Battle Prime from Google Play. This is despite the fact that the corporation has already filed seven lawsuits, five of which were rejected by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Belarus.
Press Fire Games denies the charges. Its representatives say that when developing their new game, they did not borrow anything from Wargaming, and their project is based on a new original solution.
What happened now?
Wargaming tried to defend its position in the USA, but to no avail. This was announced in a press release by Press Fire Games. According to her, the California court considered that consideration of this issue in the United States would not “comply with the principles of fair play and fair justice.”
The judge noted that it would be ineffective to settle the dispute between the companies in the States, at least because Press Fire Games is not a resident of the United States. Most of the witnesses are also located outside of North America.
However, this is not the last trial in the case. In addition to Belarus and the United States, court proceedings are also taking place on the territory of Cyprus. It is not yet known how long they will take.