Property infringement : what are my options ?

[Ezelia]

Hello all,
 
this is the first time I'm facing this situation.
a game I made was copied by a chineese company and published without my permission.
 
well you'll tell me that this is HTML and anyone can copy it ... this is true, but when they copy it, I'd like that they keep my logo in the loading screen
 
beside that, the company behind it seems to be a serious company so I suspect that someone just stole the code and sold it to that company.
 
my code was already copied by small sites or blogs but they always keeped the logo and they are not HTML5 companies, this make all the difference for me.
 
the original game is : h**p://germiz.ezelia.com/
and the copy is : h**p://xc.uc.cn/bbs/Game/germiz/
 
just load one after the other you'll see the difference
 
I contacted the company by email asking them kindly to remove the game or paye me a royalty fee, and put back my logo.
 
they have contacts in the USA, India and China ... if I don't get response I'll call them on the USA phone.
 
have anyone already faced this situation ? is there anything else I can do ?

[Solidus]

Very awesome game.  The title of the tab at least says it is by Ezelia.  They obviously didn't know to change that.

[Ezelia]

I think they just forget to rename it since it's only the html <title> tag

[sandy234]

chinese portals always seems to do this stuff. Even in android there are many games like contra etc which are ported to android by these ppl.

[MichaelH]

China is hard to tackle, honestly, best thing i can see you doing is getting in touch with the US office asap, you will have more luck there. Its clearly your game and even if they bought it from someone else, that isn't down to you, so you can expect something from them. I rekon get in touch with the US office and talk about it

[Ezelia]

@True Valhalla : it happened to me too but with some small websites or individuals, but in this case the company seems more "professional" ... seriously   look at their website : http://www.ucweb.com/index.html

btw : I also obfuscate and protect my games (making them playable from a single domain) but since this one is in beta I just obfuscated the JS code, and logo modification was pretty simple since it was just an image

 

 

@MichaelH : sure I'll contact the US office and ask for explanations I'm just waiting one or two business days to see if they answer my email.

[sandy234]

Isnt there any service for html5 games like mochi for flash which protects their game.

[Ezelia]

there is no 100% protection for HTML5 or flash games. if your game don't rely on a server (multi-player game or a game with all logic stored on the server), there is allways a way to copy it.

 

you can only make the copy hard to achieve by obfuscating, protecting, tagging ...etc

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

Your game is brilliant. Really first time I saw such cool game xD It is very sad somebody stole it

 

The sad part of story is they are based on China, laws are VERY complex there. Imagine a country who is a 'Communist (stateless classless anarchy) state', to justify various policy as socialist and which would endup in communist utopia laws are complex and not very easy to deal with in China. If company really care about your rights only then this problem would be solved. Generally good minded companies do. But yes, 'Evil Empires' and startups don't

 

This is really very sad problem, people now a days think that programmer who works very hard shouldn't be paid because the result of work isn't physical. I mean that is what we can call pure materialism, no value to intellectual excersie done which off course have physical effect on company who uses it in form of increase in $$$ for them.