Wargaming has sued former employees. She demands $1.69 million from them
The Belarusian indie studio Blitz Team has stated that Wargaming is pursuing its former employees for working on an open source project.
World of TanksWhat happened?
Minsk Blitz Team, which launched the Battle Prime game in early December, announced personal lawsuits against its employees. Wargaming collectively requires compensation of $1.69 million from five people.
On claims Wargaming has initiated at least five civil cases in the Republic of Belarus, as the indie studio became aware on December 17 from the Judicial Board for Intellectual Property.
What are the Blitz Team employees accused of?
All the accused previously worked in Wargaming. They also, as far as can be understood from the document prepared by the Blitz Team, previously worked with the DAVA Framework/DAVA Engine.
This technology is the source of the conflict. Wargaming claims that in 2014 it received exclusive rights to the DAVA Framework/DAVA Engine.
The defendants are charged that they (1) posted counterfeit copies of the engine sources on GitHub when they worked in the Game Stream studio (Minsk division of Wargaming), (2) “created forks from these copies to personal accounts in GitHub” and (3) since 2016 “as a result of offenses” added links to the forks for an open BSD3 license.
Blitz Team Position
The studio is surprised by this situation. It appeals to four things.
- First, to the fact that she Wargaming has stated more than once before: DAVA Framework / DAVA Engine is distributed under an open BSD3 license. Plus, before the purchase, this toolkit was distributed through it.
- Secondly, to correspondence with the management of Wargaming regarding licensing issues and changes.
- Thirdly, to the history of changes itself, which, according to Blitz Team, says that the technology has been actively developed for five years under a BSD3 license, which the top managers of Wargaming were aware of.
- Fourth, to the fact that Wargaming, instead of using the DMCA procedure, “which allows, if there are legal grounds, to request the removal of the entire fork tree from the GitHub site,” initiated lawsuits against former employees.
The studio does not know whether lawsuits have been filed against other Wargaming employees who made changes to the DAVA Framework/DAVA Engine. The Blitz Team admits that lawsuits may be related to the recent release of Battle Prime. The latter, according to the studio, was developed on the original closed engine.
As for the DAVA Framework/DAVA Engine, it was used when working on World of Tanks Blitz and World of Tanks Generals.
The original document from the Blitz Team can be found at this link.
***
We have reached out to Wargaming for a comment. You can read the comment here.
