Eric Farraro (aka Lazy Peon) has removed iOS game League Of Epic Heroes from sale in all countries following the receipt of a copyright infringement notice from developer QCF Design. QCF and Farraro have been in an ongoing dispute over the similarites of LOEH to QCF's own upcoming Rogue-like, Desktop Dungeons.
"Older media like film and music have rather complex attribution and copying systems in place that work most of the time," explains QCF game designer, Danny Day, in a blog on the developer's site. "Concepts like plagiarism and referencing are extremely important to authors and scientists alike. To say that the medium of games can’t have any form of starvation-prevention for the stupid buggers that keep making them doesn’t seem to make much sense.
"It’s hard to imagine how games can be protected as IP for the same reasons that it would be hard for someone to imagine the idea of copyright before the advent of the printing press: It’s only a relevant problem now, we have no language to correctly quantify how much of a game was copied and at what fidelity."
Farraro's capitulation to QCF's request comes not long after the controversy caused by Doodle Jump developer Lima Sky when it attempted to remove iOS games that referenced 'doodle' from the App Store. Similarly, Capcom has faced accusations of plagiarism following the release of its iOS title, MaXplosion.
A pre-release version of Desktop Dungeons can be downloaded from the QCF Design's website.