The war of the social networking sites and search engines look old now as social gaming wars are heating up the news list. Zynga had earlier filed a lawsuit against Vostu in California and now it has sued Vostu rather quietly on Vostu’s home soil which is Brazil. One can view the past of the social gaming war between these two here and here. But in the latest lawsuit, Zynga has dragged Search Engine giant, Google along with Vostu.
Google is dragged in this lawsuit as it has hosted games made by Vostu on Orkut. Orkut in Brazil is highly popular and it included Vostu’s games which have been termed by Zynga as ‘ripoffs’. Google has been involved in so many cases that it might have even lost the count of the cases its involved in. But this lawsuit dragging is weird as Zynga has Google as a shareholder. This must be a however thrilling lawsuit, awaiting its result.
For the time being, Vostu and Google have been noted as guilty, because a Judge here in Brazil has agreed with Zynga’s claim. Vostu has a preliminary injunction going against itself as per the ruling of the Judge. The Judge said that Orkut and Vostu should remove 4 games from the social networking site and if they are not removed in a time frame of 48 hours, then they would have to pay a fine of R20,000 (which counts up to $ 13,000). The four conflicting games are Vostu Poker, Pet Mania, Café Mania and MegaCity.
In a press statement, Zynga stated that it has a lawsuit filed against Vostu in Brazil with charges of unfair competition and copyright infringement. The charges are for the games which were copied by Vostu. Zynga was happy that the court acted in its favor and has ordered for the removal of those games. Zynga even said that the matter was serious and it had caused harm which was irreparable because of the violations. The company even mentioned that there was a need to guard consumers of Brazil from acts of unfair competition and infringement.
The analysis of the games were done by Professor Bruno Feijó, from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Chief of Vision Lab and came to a conclusion that Vostu’s games were a clear copy case and that Vostu had not only copied the visula interface, but even the gameplay was copied. Confirmation was received even from Professor João Bernardes Junior, from the University of São Paulo (USP), who affirmatively said that the games were copied from Zynga’s version for both player interface and gameplay.
General Counsel for Zynga, Reggie Davis said that it would like to welcome Vostu as a competitor for social gaming, but it would not tolerate infringement in any form of their creative minds. He said that his competitors can take inspiration from the games of Zynga, but not make an exact copy of their games as it would be considered as violation of the law.
There is still a bit of confusion as to why Facebook wasn’t even dragged into the lawsuit. The reason being that these games are well active on Facebook even and there are many users using it on the same platform.
Vostu on the other hand stated that there is no merit to the ruling and they would go ahead and appeal against the ruling. It said that Zynga has no real consumer market in Brazil and Vostu had ignored entering into a partnership with Zynga which raged Zynga. That’s why Zynga lodged a lawsuit against Vostu.