Wargaming Sues Apple

BACKGROUND

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a district court in California dismissing Wargaming.net’s lawsuit against competitor Blitzteam for lack of personal jurisdiction. Earlier this week, Wargaming filed a new lawsuit regarding the same infringing content, but this time sued Apple for “marketing, hosting, and distributing” BlitzTeam’s game Battle Prime which allegedly “copies and uses Wargaming’s copyrighted source code” without authorization.

ALLEGATIONS AGAINST APPLE

After reciting the same allegations from the previous complaint against Blitzteam, Wargaming alleges that it sent a notice of claimed infringement to Apple on September 15, 2020 with all of the standard DMCA notice requirements. About a week later, Apple responded with its usual message that it “cannot serve as arbiter for disputes among third parties” and told Wargaming to “work directly with [Blitzteam] to resolve any concerns you have.” Wargaming claims that Apple’s failure to disable Battle Prime in response to a valid DMCA take-down notice makes Apple directly liable for copyright infringement.

QUICK THOUGHTS

Game developers don’t sue Apple or Google directly very often. Ubisoft did so last May, but the case quickly settled. It will be interesting to see if this case quickly settles also, continuing the pattern, or if Wargaming will fight this out, perhaps even setting a new precedent. We’ll provide more updates as the case progresses.