Publishing house Wargaming.net filed a lawsuit against the Belarusian studio to the Los Angeles Federal District Court Blitz team. This was reported by the press service of the company.
Blitz Team is formed from former employees of Wargaming.net, who previously worked on a mobile game World of tanks blitz. In 2019, the studio released the game Battle prime.
In December of that year, Wargaming.net accused several Blitz Team employees of illegally using the graphics engine. DAVA Enginewhose source code was publicly available on Github. However, in 2014, the publisher bought the engine and forbade changes to be made to it. The lawsuit was referred to the court of Belarus.
And in February 2023, the Nicosian court forbade the Blitz Team to use the word Blitz. According to Wargaming.net, the word Blitz is firmly connected with the company, and the team of creators of World of Tanks Blitz among developers was known exactly as Blitz team. Therefore, the company believes that the competitor studio is trying to cash in on a good name.
“In addition to his salary, he made additional payments on World of Tanks Blitz profits totaling more than $ 10 million. Under agreements with Wargaming, they pledged not to compete with their former employer and not to lure his employees for a certain time after leaving”, – indicated in the statement.
A lawsuit in an American court is also linked to a trademark abuse case that violates United States federal law. The defendant is also accused of unfair competition, and the plaintiff demands to cancel the application for registration of trademarks of Blitz Team.
On March 6, 2023, representatives of the Blitz Team commented on legal battles. They noted that they learned about the decision of the Nicosia court from the press release of Wargaming.net, and representatives of the defendants were not present at the meetings. At the same time, the studio insists that the Battle Prime engine was written from scratch.
Regarding the use of trademarks, former employers are also allegedly trying to take control of the Battle Prime trademark. Blitz Team filed an application for registration in May 2019 in Belarus, and in June of the same year Wargaming.net submitted a similar application to the European Intellectual Property Office. The first received approval in November 2019, and the second in January 2023.
Blitz Team also told VC.ru that Wargaming.net for some reason had no complaints about other companies using the word Blitz (Bingo blitz, Tetris blitz and so on). Therefore, we can talk about patent trolling and unfair competition. Given this, the studio is ready to appeal the decision of the Cyprus court.
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