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Police are investigating a suspected theft of software code for online game "Lineage III" which is being developed by Korea’s largest game maker NCsoft.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police said Wednesday that seven former NCsoft employees are suspected of having sold the technology to a major Japanese game company.
The seven left the Korean firm in February and allowed the Japanese company to review the software during a job interview. Police believe that the technology might have been copied during the demonstration.
The former NCsoft employees are also under suspicion of having leaked the program design of "Lineage III" by email or portable disk last September.
According to police and industry insiders, the game company has suffered from an internal management problem since a senior game developer was fired for poor leadership skills.
But the sacking only led to greater problems for the company, since most of developer’s 90-member team quit with their chief.
An NCsoft spokesman estimated the potential damage at over W1 trillion (US$1=W927) considering that the combined sales of "Lineage I" and "Lineage II" topped W1.5 trillion.
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Yet another blemish on the face of games development…
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I know what these workers did was morally reprehensible, but I can’t help but feel there was personal troubles, bureaucracy and management issues that prompted this.
I guess the moral of this seems to be "Be careful in managing and dealing with your workers when they have access to over $1 million of company assets"
Then again, I’m sure there were plenty of workers that didn’t take part of this and now have their hard work probably going to someone who won’t appreciate what they did or pay them back for it.
Anyway, what’s the Japanese company going to do with this code? I know it can be hard to determine the source code used in a compiled game but even so, wouldn’t the Japanese company risk serious copyright violations if they used the code? Or am I missing something? -
Is it possible to prove that they copied it?
Or do they have to use it or sell it on and be caught that way before they can be prosecuted? -
Madness i say.
Ive never heard anything about Lineage aprt from these rediculous news stories from Korea about dudes killing each other over ingame disputes and government limity game hours for citizens.
Has any1 here actually played the game?
I suppose wth a market of a few billion over there, NC arent too pushed with pushing it here. Westeners get City of Heroes! -
Is it possible to prove that they copied it?
Or do they have to use it or sell it on and be caught that way before they can be prosecuted?[/quote:907c2552fc]‘They’ (NCSoft) would have to prove that the ex-employees either
* obtained (whatever) unlawfully/without consent <that one is theft and/or
* the japanese co. obtained (whatever) unlawfully<that one is theft also.In practice, I believe it’s at the moment more a breach of confidence than outright ‘theft’, because what happened is probably more along the lines of the ex-employees
* disclosed (whatever) in breach of contractual obligations not to.If NCSoft had any nounce (and provided the material lends itself to it), they should have applied for KR and JP patents (and actually may still, even if material disclosed, provided it was in breach of confidence), which would make copyright infringement issues irrelevant (adaptation of code might make copyright infringement go away, but still infringes the patent).
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