Recently we’ve been bringing you the saga of Cloudstone, a Western-developed indie game that was totally copied by Chinese “developers” and remains hosted on Tencent’s game platforms. Think that was just an isolated example? Think again.
Meet Impact, a Javascript game engine developed and sold by Dominic Szablewski that helps users make HTML5 games. Now meet Impact’s illegal ‘Chinese version’; an exact copy of Szablewski’s site and product that Szablewski has absolutely nothing to do with. The only differences are that the copied version costs way less, it comes with no after-sales support, and the money it generates is deposited into the bank account of a thief, not the engine’s real developer.
The real Impact site is on the left; the site illegally selling copies of Impact for half price is on the right
Szablewski says he first became aware of that someone in China was copying his website and illegally selling his game engine back in June. He told Tech in Asia:
I first tried to contact [the guy who stole my game engine] directly via email. Asked what he was up to and what it would take to make him stop. Obviously I never received an answer.
A few days later I emailed his hoster [the US-based Softlayer] with the request to suspend his account. Again, never received an answer.
On June 19th I registered an account on kilofox.net [the illegal Chinese copy’s domain] to look at the site a bit closer. The response to this was a DOS attack on impactjs.com [the official Impact website] that brought the site down temporarily.
The copied site, kilofox.net, is registered to one Long Yang, and the address listed along with its registration is in Harbin, the capital of China’s Heilongjiang province, although the Kilofox site suggests Long may now live in Beijing. When contacted by Tech in Asia with an request for an interview, Mr. Long responded:
The website [kilofox.net] is mine, but the product is not mine. I don’t think an interview is necessary.
Further attempts by this site to contact Mr. Long have been ignored.
Interestingly, Long’s site is hosted by Softlayer, a US-based hosting company that one would expect to be more responsive to claims of copyright violation. But Szablewski says that Softlayer has not been helpful:
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