I have been speaking to various people at some of the portals that are being closed, and I have been able to find out a few more details about what is going on:
As was already known, the other portals such as Lekool and R2Games have taken down the game rather than incur the cost of a legal dispute, as Evony have threatened to sue the portals if they did not comply. It also seems that Evony want $1.8 million from Heroic Era (the parent company of .net), and that the game almost certainly has not even grossed anywhere near that much, let alone made enough unspent profit to be able to pay Evony off. It is not clear whether this is the demands made by the court or by Evony, I hope to have clarification on this soon.
As the devs clearly have no intention of forking over this large sum of money, I think it is safe to assume that the CallOfRoma.com servers are safe for now. Evony's options now are limited, and it will be weeks, if not months, of legal disputes before the servers can be forcibly shut down. It may not even be possible for Evony to shut down the servers. I am not an expert in international copyright law, but as far as I am aware there is no global copyright law that could be enforced upon China based Heroic Era. I am awaiting replies that will clarify this though.
From what I know though, I suspect that the .net servers still have lots of life left in them.
Dose Evony own the rights to "Kingdoms of Camelot" on Facebook? Because that game is an exact carbon copy of Evony. I've played both Call of Roma and Evony and there should be enough differences not to be considerd copy right infringement.
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Kingdoms of Camelot is copyrighted to Kabam, so I am presuming not. The allegation that Evony is making is that an ex employee of Evony took a large chunk of code with him when he went to work for Heroic Era, and that he used that chunk of Evony code in Caesary, to the point where the typos are the same. I havent seen either set of code, so I can neither confirm nor deny this at the minute - that is up to the courts. Although according to Evony, they have already won the legal challenge over this issue.
ReplyDeleteAfter some quick research I found that China is a member of the WIPO, meaning, if I'm not mistaken, that the UN can enforce Evony's patents in China.
ReplyDeleteChina is part of the WIPO. Ive just had a look at the Berne Convention, which is the treaty WIPO uses to enforce its decisions, and it is far less comprehensive than US or EU copyright laws. I do not know if the Berne Convention will allow Evony to enforce the court decision or not, we would need to find a lawyer for that. Thanks for bringing that to my attention though :)
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