The Wargaming case against Blitz Team continues to evolve. The Belarusian court sided with the former employees of the company, who were accused of violating intellectual property and unfair competition, and denied the claim for $ 1.69 million.What happened?
The decision was made on December 9 at a session of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Belarus.
The board refused Wargaming to satisfy the claim against five former employees who, after leaving, founded the studio Blitz Team (now renamed Press Fire Games).
In addition to monetary compensation, the court denied Wargaming all other claims, including the removal of handicaps from GitHub. Press Fire Games calls the results of the meeting “the first real victory”.
Wargaming does not agree with this decision and now intends to defend its position in the courts of the United States and the Republic of Cyprus.
“Despite the fact that the decision on the case is final and the legislation of the Republic of Belarus does not provide for its appeal, the company does not change its position on protecting its violated rights and will continue to defend them in other jurisdictions,” the company’s official statement says.
In a press release, Press Fire Games reports that the trial in the United States may take another couple of years, and there are no forecasts at all for the proceedings in Cyprus.
Brief chronology of the conflictWargaming sued the former employees in December 2019.
The company accused five people from the independent studio Blitz Team of posting the DAVA Engine code on GitHub and creating handicaps from these copies to personal accounts.
The fact is that the employees mentioned in the statement of claim used to work in the Minsk office of Wargaming and participated in the development of World of Tanks Blitz and the DAVA Engine. At the same time, the representatives of the Blitz Team themselves deny the accusations, appealing, among other things, to the fact that this framework is distributed under an open license.
In total, Wargaming filed seven lawsuits, five of which were rejected by the Supreme Court of Belarus. However, in other jurisdictions, the company managed to achieve satisfaction of a number of its other claims.
- Wargaming considered that the name of the studio Blitz Team, as well as its Blitz Engine, violates its trademark WOTB BLITZ.As a result, the Blitz Team changed its name to Press Fire Games in July.
- According to the director of the studio Kirill Polyakov, the ban on the use of the word “blitz” in Europe is temporary.Wargaming has filed a lawsuit in a California court that Battle Prime, a mobile game of Press Fire Games, infringes on its intellectual property.
- As a result, the project was removed from Google Play and is now available only to iOS users.Press Fire Games claims that it did not borrow anything from Wargaming and did not use the company’s source codes.
- Now the developers are trying to contact Google and challenge the ban, but so far to no avail.Wargaming also claims that a non-competition agreement was concluded between the companies, and the employees indicated in the lawsuit were paid more than $ 10 million, but Polyakov denies the existence of such an agreement.
- In a new press release, the director of Press Fire Games also said that Wargaming offered the studio to go global.
“The conditions were very simple: the WG waives all its demands to all the defendants, and in return we simply undertake not to tell anyone about it and keep secret everything that was in court,” Polyakov claims.
Wargaming did not report anything about the settlement agreement, and Press Fire Games announced the rejection of the proposed conditions. Both companies intend to continue to defend their interests in court.