A court has ruled that "ROM: Remember of Majesty," a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released by Kakao Games (293490) and Redlab Games, did not infringe the copyright of NC's (036570) "Lineage W."
According to the legal community on the 13th, the 62nd Civil Settlement Division of the Seoul Central District Court (presiding judge Lee Hyun-seok) recently ruled against the plaintiff in the copyright infringement injunction lawsuit filed by NC against Redlab Games and Kakao Games. Kim & Chang represented NC, while Lee & Ko represented Kakao Games.
NC argued that "ROM" copied the game concept, content, art, user interface (UI), and staging of "Lineage W." NC claimed, "It goes beyond the common and general characteristics of the MMORPG genre to a level where creativity is difficult to recognize, and we determined that it unauthorizedly appropriated and plagiarized NCSoft's intellectual property (IP)."
In contrast, Kakao Games and Redlab Games countered that the game components mentioned by NC are not specific expressions protected under copyright law but merely ideas, and that even these were simply borrowed and combined from works already released before Lineage W, thus lacking creativity. They also argued that the components of Lineage W and ROM are not substantially similar.
The court found that while some expressive elements of ROM and Lineage W are similar, most of Lineage W's components are merely ideas and thus not subject to copyright protection. It also noted that they were merely borrowed from preceding games, lacking creativity or not similar to ROM. Additionally, among the elements subject to copyright protection, the court said that the grade display of the transformation and magic doll systems and the shop NPC design are similar to ROM, but their proportion in the overall game is not significant, making it difficult to view them as copyright infringement.
The court explained, "If NC's selection, modification, arrangement, and combination of components from its preceding games were all recognized as NC's achievements, it could lead to the unjust result of granting NC exclusive rights over elements that had already been made public and existed in the public domain." It continued, "For selection, modification, arrangement, and combination to be recognized as NC's achievement, they must reach a level that carries reputation and customer appeal to users," adding, "However, no materials were submitted that could confirm the reputation or customer appeal of the selection, modification, arrangement, and combination related to each component in this case."
NC filed a lawsuit seeking to halt copyright infringement, claiming that Kakao Games' MMORPG "Archeage War" plagiarized "Lineage 2M," but lost in both the first and second trials. NC has appealed the ruling.
