The ongoing copyright case between Angela Game and Snail Games over Myth of Empires continues, with Snail Games filing a countersuit against Angela Game and Tencent. The new lawsuit is in response to Angela Game’s own suit requesting an injunction and quick decision by a judge on the alleged copyright violations. That effort was denied, and now there’s a new major filing.
As reported by MMOFallout, which has copies of the lawsuit documents for viewing) the new suit is expansive, with not only Angela Game as a defendant, but also Tencent for apparently ignoring a DMCA letter to go ahead and shut down Myth of Empires’ servers. Tencent is named as having financial stakes in Angela Game and the game itself and with the company’s refusal to take down the servers, is effectively enabling theft. This lawsuit also includes additional accusations that Angela Game has been essentially tampering with evidence by changing bits of Myth of Empires’ code to hide any similarities.
“And in many cases, Angela has modified the same copied code elements Snail USA had discovered and included in its DMCA notice to Valve, Tencent, and, of course, Angela. Angela had no reason to do this, other than to erase evidence of its misconduct.”
Snail Games’ suit also says that about 60 of Angela Game’s employees were once employed at Snail Games, but none of them wrote ARK’s code, implying that any similarities couldn’t just be coincidental. One employee, Yang Li Ping, had access to the source code for ARK: Survival Evolved since Yang’s job was to back up that code to the servers.
In moving ahead with this countersuit, demands are for not just forfeiture of servers and all Myth of Empires code, but for any profits gained from use of the allegedly copied code from Angela Game and Tencent. And attorney’s fees.
If there was any hope for this situation to come to a quick resolution, it seems that is gone and this will take time for whatever conclusion ultimately results. Angela Game has continued development, and even opened up a holiday event in late December.
