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糊涂版权捍卫战:Crowdstar起诉WonderHil涉嫌抄袭

发布时间:2010-04-28 01:27:03 Tags:,,,,

模仿也许是成功的捷径,特别是国内社交游戏的模仿举动更是硝烟弥漫。但是,有时候模仿的便捷将为模仿者带来法律上的障碍。

社交游戏公司Crowdstar日前正式起诉WonderHil,理由是WonderHil旗下的Aquarium Life(水族馆生活)侵犯了Crowdstar现行的游戏Happy Aquarium (开心水族馆)。sfweekly网站将它成为不让人愉悦的法律诉讼。该诉讼包含了两个层面,一个是版权纠纷,另外一个则是涉及不正当的竞争,因为这两个游戏同样在facebook平台公开面向用户的。

aquarium-life

aquarium-life

happy-aquarium

happy-aquarium

Happy Aquarium虽然活跃用户已经低于2000万,但是高峰期曾经达到2600万,该款游戏是免费游戏,但是像鱼饲料这样的附属品是需要购买的。而Crowdstar也从中获得了不菲的报酬。

但现在的问题是鱼类游戏在facebook上是一项很寻常的游戏了,包括zynga公司的fishville,只是Crowdstar的Happy Aquarium最后脱颖而出了而已,因此在起诉WonderHil的事情上,似乎Crowdstar并没有充足的理由。

关于诉讼的核心问题是Aquarium Life的游戏界面和Happy Aquarium的及其相似。

The copied fish mating dance was the last straw. The similarities between Crowdstar International’s Happy Aquarium and WonderHill’s Aquarium Life were so plentiful that the cloning of the social game is now a legal matter.

Burlingame, Calif.-based Crowdstar has  filed a federal lawsuit accusing WonderHill of unfair competition and copyright violations for copying Happy Aquarium on Facebook. Among the signature

features that WonderHill allegedly copied was a “distinctive mating dance to a backdrop of hearts and romantic music.”

It may sound trivial, but Happy Aquarium is Crowdstar’s bread and butter, attracting more than 26 million monthly active visitors a month (now fallen to about 20 million according to AppData). The game is free to play, but users pay real money for virtual goods in the game such as fish food. Crowdstar is making millions of dollars from virtual goods purchases in the game, and that has helped it expand its staff dramatically and launch new games.

The tough thing is that it may be hard for Crowdstar to prove that Aquarium Life is a rip off. Fish games have been around for a long time, and it is only recently on Facebook that they have turned into a phenomenon. Notably, Zynga launched FishVille, another fish genre game, after Happy Aquarium became so successful last fall. Aquarium Life was launched by WonderHill, a relatively small player in social games, in January.

The suit alleges that Aquarium Life’s user interface is virtually identical to Happy Aquarium’s.

The cloning of games has been a big issue in social games. Zynga cloned FarmTown, a game created by a small game company, with the launch of FarmVille last summer. Zynga’s hit game became far bigger than FarmTown, generating more than 80 million monthly active users. Yet it is hard for the makers of FarmTown to prove a case of copyright infringement, largely because farm games got their start in China.

Lots of video games are new twists on old games. The tremendously creative and popular Plants vs. Zombies game, created by PopCap games, is a derivative of Desktop Tower Defense. But the games are often so different they usually don’t result in anti-copycat lawsuits. Hence, most lawsuits related to intellectual property in video games tend to focus on the raiding of talent or the theft of actual game code.

阅读更多关于双方的诉讼资料,请关注sfweekly网 站和venturebeat


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