China Court Accepts Copyright Suit Against Blizzard
August 23rd, 2007 by Benjamin Duranske
World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment has been sued by Founder Electronics Co. Ltd., a Beijing company. Founder alleges the fonts used in Blizzard’s Chinese version of World of Warcraft infringe Founder’s copyright. 
Beijing High People’s Court recently accepted the suit. I have no idea how Chinese copyright law works (though based what I saw in Macau last year when was there taking depositions, it basically doesn’t) and I don’t know the facts here, but I’ll keep watching this to see how it plays out.
For what it’s worth, in the U.S., you can’t copyright a typeface, though you can copyright the code used to draw the typeface on a screen. In other words, if you figure out a way to make your typeface look exactly like someone else’s on your own, you’re fine. If you use someone else’s code (e.g. font) without licensing it, however, you may be liable for infringement.
Any Chinese copyright law experts out there want to weigh in?
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5 Responses to “China Court Accepts Copyright Suit Against Blizzard”
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Simple solution – Cut the Chinese out of the picture. China has done more harm than good by allowing sweat shops of young and old people farming, selling gold, and or powerleveling and runing many of the servers economies. Why support a Country these days that supports communism? Why do you want to contribute American dollars to that nasty Country anyways?
Blizzard should settle it by telling those fat asshats they will remove the product from the shelves, then Blizzard should ban the entire string of IP’s from the Country.
Ni Hao Beatches!
Hi there Lunareth
I can’t at all see why blizzard would ever do that, when it’s from asia they earn the most money i’m talking about the 5,5 million people playing WoW in asia, and probably a large part of them if not the major part of that is from China, so that would mean that they would loose millions of money each month, which would then give them less resources to work on actually improving the game or whatever the money is used for, but yes i do get your point a large part of the people from China is goldfarmers or whatever, but not all, so that would mean that they would loose money and get angry costumers from that country, and i don’t think as the things are now (i’m talking about more and more companies moving to China) that Blizzard would like to totally cut them out, that would most likely mean more damage done than if leaving them do whatever. This was a reply to Lunareth, and not to the actual post.
Tinno
I just read what you had to say. I still see no reason for these Chinese sweat shops should have access to the game Why cut China completely from the program? Because that may well be the only way for Blizzard to maintain control over their game.
I’ve played since day one, and the only thing constant are the spammers selling gold or power-leveling. In fact friends of mine literally left WoW behind because of the ecomony busting these sweat shops have been doing to the game.
You are off base on your idea of a sweat shop. In China, 80 cents an hour is a good wage. Doctor’s make $3 an hour.
Yes, many of them work 12 hours a day to feed their families, but they can choose not to work. The connotation of sweat is also off base. If you could work 12 hours a day, playing a game you like in an air-conditioned room, or work in the rice fields doing manual labor for the same amount of money, which would you choose?
You are probably comparing your life to theirs, and it is a completely different culture and a different economy. In comparison, yes, 80 cents an hour sux. Before you start commenting on so called sweat shops, perhaps you can consider the same things as they apply to where you live.
For Example….
Some of my family work the fields in California, they get paid $40 a day. They often have to work 12-16 hours a day as well. Thats roughly $3 an hour they make. I do not see an outcry for their wages to be raised, even knowing the minimum wage is $7.75 an hour in California. If they did cry out and get a better wage, then the cost of your fruits, vegetables, beef, and nuts, would raise up 2-3 times what you pay now.
Would it help for you to know that because of the competition, we make about 15-25% profit on all orders at ubergold.com? If we were to pay the workers in China who farm the gold more, then we would have to raise the rates and risk losing customers to other sites, or we could lose the small profit percentage we now make. In most business models, this would be unheard of.
Applying feelings and morals to business, makes people lose work and businesses go bankrupt. What matters is that this system works and in reality, the workers do not mind the wages they make, because again it’s better then working in the fields.
“Applying feelings and morals to business, makes people lose work and businesses go bankrupt.”
let’s go back to slavery then !
so we can have a very cheap labor, that we can let die on the field to make more money !