An appellate court also ruled against the plaintiff in the copyright infringement suit that NCSOFT filed, claiming that Kakao Games' MMORPG "ArcheAge War" copied "Lineage2M." The court found it difficult to view the game elements of Lineage2M as an original work clearly distinguishable from prior games.
The Civil Division 5-2 of the Seoul High Court on the 12th dismissed the plaintiff's appeal in the appellate trial of the lawsuit seeking to stop copyright infringement that NCSOFT filed against Kakao Games and its subsidiary XLGAMES.
The bench determined that Lineage2M is difficult to regard as a work with original expression distinguishable from prior games and did not accept NCSOFT's claim of copyright infringement.
On the claim that Kakao Games engaged in unfair competition, the court also viewed that a significant portion of the elements at issue—scenario, characters, items, and user interface (UI)—fall within the public domain available for anyone to use.
In Apr. 2023, NCSOFT filed the suit, saying Kakao Games copied the UI, character development method, convenience features, and more of its game "Lineage2M," released in 2019.
NCSOFT argued that the structure limiting weapons and skills by character class, the system of combining four classes of the same grade, the method of collecting various classes to complete a collection, the quest reward system given on specific dates, the character disposition metrics, and the game settings items and default screen layout are similar in terms of UI and system design.
Earlier, in Jan. last year, the court of first instance also sided with Kakao Games. At the time, the court found it difficult to recognize originality in Lineage2M's system as well, judging it to be at the level of partially modifying existing game rules such as "Ragnarok M" (2018) and "V4" (2019).
It also stated that game rules or methods of progression fall within the realm of ideas and are not subject to copyright protection even if they have originality or novelty. On the unfair competition claim, the court held that the common basic rules, progression methods, and specific expressions of both games are not domains that any particular business operator can monopolize.