14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen everything now! It appears that Blizzard Entertainment and WoW's Chinese operator in the area got sued for using Chinese fonts illegally. Founder Group, a software company from Beijing has just filed the lawsuit, claiming that WoW's developer and the local operator have used those character fonts in an illicit manner.
This sure reminds me of one of the greatest font similarities in history that generated no trial at all. I'm talking about the official Spider-Man 3 fonts and the Playstation 3 logo fonts, which are identical. This time Blizzard will have to pay $13.2 million in case Founder Group wins the trial and even if WoW brings a huge profit, we're puzzled to see such figures for a couple of character fonts.
The9 Limited is the second company involved in this lawsuit, being the local operator of the famous World of Warcraft game. It seems that the Chinese version of the MMORPG uses five Chinese character fonts, which are the property of Founder Group. They developed those fonts and discovered the whole story while casually playing Blizzard famous title.
There's no court date yet and Blizzard has yet to comment on this incident. It may seem weird that such a large amount of money is asked for five character fonts, but they're intellectual property too, so they belong to their developer who can decide to let other people use them or not. I wonder if there are other famous fonts out there that don't belong to the companies using them... I could swear that I've seen the trademark Lord of the Rings fonts in at least a dozen media products and still, there's no lawsuit.
That's quite some bad luck for Blizzard, but pulling out another MMORPG from the sleeve will surely help them recover the lost profit sooner or later.