Three former employees of a game company in Shanghai took advantage of their positions to steal the source code of the mobile game developed by the company;
The specific beginning of the incident is that the company discovered in November 2022 that a game very similar to its own product had appeared on the Internet, which made them suspect whether there was a source code leak, so they reported the case to the public security. After the police opened the case and investigated, it was found that the employee who originally developed the game was more suspected.
It is reported that these three resigned employees used to be developers of the company's mobile games; after the game was launched, they gained a lot of popularity, and they also received a generous commission for this. After that, the three people proposed to the company to develop an upgraded version of the new game, but they were rejected by the management. This led them to leave their jobs to develop on their own, and registered a company in Shenzhen.
After the three people negotiated, they provided the source code of the mobile game to another Internet company, and the other party began to operate online after a simple "skin change". At this time, the three people have not left the original company. And in order to successfully go online, they also applied the "Computer Software Copyright Registration Certificate" and "Online Game Publishing Approval and Issuance Slip".
Photo Source/Shanghai Police
After the police arrested the three people and brought them to justice, the trial learned that after the two parties reached a cooperation agreement, the profits will be distributed proportionally. The other party’s company will account for 85%, and the company where the three people work will account for 15%. Since the “pirated” game was launched, the profit has exceeded 1. 500 million, the three of them shared a profit of more than 15 million. Upstream news learned from the police that apart from the slight differences in the game name, characters, and background images, the server data sheets and server battle suits of the two games are 100% similar, and the similarity between the server game suit and the client is also 90%. %about.
At present, these three people have been taken criminal coercive measures due to the crime of illegally obtaining computer information system data, and are in the stage of release on bail. The person in charge and manager of the Internet company he cooperated with still chose to use and launch the game to make a profit even though they knew the source of the code, and the suspected copyright infringement was compulsorily investigated by the Putuo police. The case is under further investigation.