All, I just noticed two pirated versions of my game Dual Tennis published on apple app store. Exact same game, same source code, just different developer. More details here: Forget Clones, now worry about Daylight Robbery on Appstore I have contacted Apple and raised copyright infringement procedure as well. Yogesh
Unfortunately this isn't entirely new. I see it damn near every day when checking AppShopper for new games. And the overwhelming majority are from China, where copyrighting does not exist. It's starting to get more prevalent from outside China also. But most all of them come from places without copyright laws, too.
If they are just taking the code and changing the assets then the only way to stop this is to encrypt your assets and check the authenticity on load. If the assets are not the same then close the game down. You could have some fun here by letting the game be alive with the new assets for a time period then print a message saying piracy is bad or words to that effect. That would send a message to these thieves and give them some bad press. I'm sorry this has happened to you.
@NinthNinja - They are not even changing the assets. They take the app, remove the title and any asset linked to your game name and just republish as its theirs. This is stealing and is illegal. In future, I'll have to see if I can dynamically get the name of the app at runtime and if its not matching show some piracy message
It is illegal in the US/Canada/UK etc... The problem with most of this sort of thing comes out of places like China, where copyright protections don't exist. Which sadly makes it very hard, if not impossible to go after people that do it.
If you go into this further there are quite a few Chinese companies that have had investment from US companies. These Chinese companies because of lack of copyright can clone or rip source code and publish. The parent investment company should be liable for copyright infringement. I think I read somewhere that a guy got a game published from a US company and was ripped off by a Chinese company, the the publisher had investment from an investment company that also invested in the Chinese company. So when the publisher complained to the investment company, the investment company complained to the Chinese company. That issue was sorted out because of conflicting interests as the Chinese company did not want to lose it's investment strategy. But because the Chinese market is hard to crack western companies invest in Chinese companies. Now there should be laws to make these investment firms liable for copyright infringement. If they invest in the Chinese market then they should be liable from profit made from shady dealings. Simple as that.
You should do some encryption to your server URL/data, otherwise they going to get free server for their copy of games. As for ripping off your source code, I dont think u can do anything much. Do make a report of copyright infringement with proof to Apple. It is quite difficult to prove that you wrote your code too, since many freelance programmer also sells their codes in websites, so there are definitly many apps/games that have same codes in them. Good luck to u.
They can work with the ipa and just delete the graphics and update bundle identifiers. Today another clone "New Pingpong SMASH" hit the appstore. Another exact clone of my game - Dual Tennis. I'm really disappointed how apple allows such cloning.
Good detective work. It's a difficult problem to solve completely but your reporting it, and bringing attention to it, will surely help combat it.
No. Developer still is live with his other apps. I'm hoping multiple reports for the same developer would lead to that result.
My Story The way Apple do it is let developers dealing with each other. They don't care about copyright or cloning when they review the app. I think it's beyond their capability to handle such issue for millions of apps on the App Store. A few years ago, I had an app that got reported by Facebook legal team. The app is 100% original, not a clone or rip off or anything, but the app name is something like "ABCXYZ for Facebook". Apparently having "for Facebook" in the app name. is not accepted by FB Legal team. They said I violated their trade mark. So Apple wanted me to talk to Facebook legal team directly to resolve the issue. After some email back and forth, I decided to take the app down, as it didn't generate enough revenue to be worth the effort. So if you have someone using your assets illegally, just report.
Yup this is true. Apple don't care about who owns what. 3 years ago there was a developer who had his original app taken down because the cloner reported his app first.
