Chinese Stolen Game Engine Taken Down, Thief Apologizes to Real Developer

the copied kilofox.net site, now broken and no longer selling a stolen product

Last week amidst a series of stories on IP theft, we reported that a Chinese web user had stolen wholesale the product and website of a Western developer, which he was selling to Chinese users at half the product’s original price. But according to original developer Dominic Szablewski, Kilofox.net — the Chinese copy of Szablewski Impact game engine — has finally been taken down following Szablewski’s second DMCA submission to Kilofox host Softlayer.

“I still don’t know what went wrong with the first DMCA I had sent to Softlayer before you ran the story,” Szablewski told Tech in Asia. “The second DMCA (exact same wording) was quickly forwarded to the thief who then took the site down in a matter of hours.”

Kilofox.net remains operational, but returns a broken, gutted version (see above) that no longer allows users to purchase Szablewski’s game engine. Szablewski also said the thief had contacted him and apologized, explaining that ‘copyright isn’t important in China.’ Szablewski told me:

I believe the thief was some kid who took it for granted that you can do such things in China. Which makes this even more scary: it doesn’t take big a company to undermine your business. Anyway, I’m just glad that the copycat site is offline now.

Perhaps this case and the case of the stolen game Cloudstone are a testament both to how far China has come and how far it has yet to go in protecting intellectual property. On the one hand, these stories were not difficult to find. But on the other hand, when publicized and brought to the attention of the companies involved in supporting these thefts, both cases were resolved with relative speed.

We’ll be keeping an eye on these sites to make sure that none of these copies come back.