Sued Freelancer Allegedly Turns Over Contractee Source Code In Settlement

FriendlySolipsist writes: Blizzard Entertainment has been fighting World of Warcraft bots for years. TorrentFreak reports that Bossland, a German company that operates "buddy" bots, alleges Blizzard sued one of its freelancers and forced a settlement. As part of that settlement, the freelancer allegedly turned over Bossland's source code to Blizzard. In Bossland's view, their code was "stolen" by Blizzard because it was not the freelancer's to disclose. This is a dangerous precedent for freelance developers in the face of legal threats: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Comments

Defendants screwed up

[flopsquad]

It's not immediately clear from the short search I did, but I'm working on the assumption that Apoc was sued in a US court (and that the legal proceedings between Bossland and Blizzard have been in German courts).

If that's the case, Apoc and Bossland screwed the pooch on this. Because Bossland (and its IP) is the real party in interest in the Apoc case, they had a right to intervene in the Apoc case. The argument boils down to "Hey you can't sue $randomGuy seeking $myStuff without me being involved; I have a right to fight this even though I'm not the original defendant." And likewise, Apoc had the right to try and rope in Bossland, on the flip side argument, "Whoa, I'm not the droid you're after, and what you're asking for isn't even mine."

It would seem that either:
-Bossland didnt know (that a freelancer possessing their entire code base was being sued by the object of all their bot programs??), or

-Bossland didn't want to cede personal jurisdiction in the US (very complex and nuanced, and there are plenty of creative arguments Blizzard could have used to get what it wanted, esp. with the source code stored by Apoc in the US), or, most likely,

-Apoc just freaked out and (too) quickly said "Blaaaaaughhh here take the source code go away!"

In any case, Bossland's claim of copyright infringement seems tenuous against Blizzard. If anyone, it was Apoc who infringed (and maybe broke non-disclosure) by distributing a copy of the code to Blizzard. But there's little point in Bossland suing its freelancer. Blizzard did probably make copies of their own, and so there's an interesting question as to whether Bossland could get them for infringement there.

Also, contrary to TFS, settlements may set behavioral precedents, but they don't set legal precedents.