Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we cover a new lawsuit filed last month by Blizzard Entertainment against a competing game developer for allegedly knocking off many elements of their series of Warcraft games.
As most listeners of Frogpants network shows know, Blizzard has recently released WoW Classic, a revisit to the original days of World of Warcraft. That endeavor has been very successful, at least initially, so Blizzard knows the market power of copying elements of Warcraft and reusing them in new game titles. Warcraft has been a primary profit driver for Blizzard since the initial game's release in 1994.
As such, it should not be surprising to see Blizzard also cast a wider net in trying to stop unfair competition and copying of this same valuable intellectual property. In this case, a Hong Kong company called JoyFun Inc. released a game entitled Glorious Saga on mobile and web platforms last October. The marketing materials for Glorious Saga appear to use many visual and audio elements that appear to be copied from the Warcraft series.
Indeed, the alleged copying goes well beyond the marketing materials intended to get players interested in Glorious Saga. Players of that game have reported that all kinds of original Warcraft elements such as names and artwork for characters, locations, and weapon designs are pulled directly from the Warcraft universe. Of course, JoyFun did not approach or obtain a license to use this subject material, assuming it is protected by copyright or other IP.
So Blizzard filed the lawsuit in California to try and shut down Glorious Saga and its game servers. Blizzard makes the case in its Complaint that JoyFun has also previously ripped off IP elements from Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh in other games without taking appropriate licenses of the underlying IP. To this end, JoyFun operates in that legal gray area where they often force companies like Blizzard to pursue them formally to stop this type of game development practice.
The Bottom Line is: While some consumers may have mixed feelings about Blizzard enforcing IP rights in court, in this case Blizzard is still actively developing and exploiting their own Warcraft universe. That makes it harder to justify what JoyFun is doing at the same time, assuming they did copy these original assets from Warcraft in the Glorious Saga game. We will continue to monitor to see if JoyFun puts up any significant defense to this lawsuit, at least when we aren't busy leveling in The Barrens or Stranglethorn Vale.
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