3 Count: Bethesda Bugs

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1: Bethesda Sues Warner Bros, Calls its Westworld Game ‘Blatant Rip-off’ of Fallout Shelter

First off today, Michael McWhertor at Polygon reports that Bethesda Softworks have filed a lawsuit against Warner Brothers and Behaviour Interactive over the recently released game Westworld, which Bethesda claims is a copyright infringement of their game Fallout Shelter.

Bethesda teamed up with Behaviour to produce Fallout Shelter, a mobile game that went on to be released on all the major consoles as well as PCs. However, according to Bethesda, when Behaviour teamed up with Warner Bros. to make a mobile game based on the Westwood TV series, they reused the “game design, art style, animations, features and other gameplay elements” from Fallout Shelter.

Bethesda claims that, as proof of this, they found that a bug that was evident in early versions of Fallout Shelter made it into Westwood, proving that the two games have computer code, not just gameplay elements, in common. Bethesda is suing for copyright infringement, breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. It is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages.

2: Childish Gambino’s manager denies accusation of plagiarism over “This is America”

Next up today, Andrea Park at CBS News reports that listeners and fans are accusing Childish Gambino, also known as Donald Glover, of plagiarism in his recent hit song This is America.

Reddit user FutureLaDiDaDiDa posted about similarities between This is America and American Pharaoh by Jase Harley. He cited lyrical and musical similarities as well as overlapping themes between the songs. Harley, for his part, said in an Instagram post that he’s never worked with Glover in any way but shared the suspicions that This is America was influenced by his song. However, he said that he wasn’t worried about it because “Sampling is the culture of hip-hop.”

Glover’s manager, however, came forward and said that they were working on their song before American Pharaoh was released. However, both sides have said that they do not want this story to distract from the messages of the two songs, both of which deal with issues of race and injustice in America.

3: Copyright Lawsuit Dropped Against Fortnite Creators, Ending Legal Battle

Finally today, Sam Kim at Bloomberg reports that PUBG Corp, the company behind the popular game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has withdrawn its lawsuit against Epic Games over the even more popular game Fortnite, though it is unclear if a settlement was reached or what the outcome of the case was.

PUBG began the current trend of “Battle Royale” video games, which feature mammoth 100 competitor matches on a small playing field. PUBG Corp filed the lawsuit in South Korea alleging that Fortnite copied elements from PUBG even though Epic Games provides some of the technology used to create PUBG and both companies are partly owned by Tencent Holdings.

However, that lawsuit has now been dismissed though it is unclear if a settlement was reached or if anything was changed by the lawsuit at all.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.