League of Legendsis the clear flagship IP for Riot Games, and the company has already startedexpanding theLeague of Legendsuniverse into new properties. As with most companies with a massively successful franchise, Riot Games is very protective of its IP. Now, that has boiled over into legal action regarding a fan-made legacy project.
The project in question is called Chronoshift, an independent project with the intention of making a legacy version ofLeague of Legendsfrom how it existed 10 years ago. Chronoshift had been quietly in development for about five years, but things came to a head recently when the developers were contacted on Discord by a Riot security employee named Zed. While the conversation started off amicably, with Zed stating how Riot “isn’t super thrilled about your project unfortunately and is looking for a way to come to a mutually acceptable end to it,” the conversation from Zed quickly devolved into threats and unprofessional behavior.
RELATED:League of Legends Charity Skin Raises $7 Million
Riot’s legal team ended up getting involved, and officially sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Chronoshift developers, as reported by PC Gamer. Riot confirmed that while Zed was an employee, the company was “disappointed” in how the conversation was handled, and would be addressing the situation internally.As standard with most cease-and-desist letters, it demands the end of all development on Chronoshift, and that the developers close their servers and hand over all modded software, clients, and code.
Riot Games is no stranger to legal action, for better and for worse. The cease-and-desist letter states that while Riot hopes the issue can be resolved informally, the company is prepared to pursue legal litigation. It is worth noting that a year ago, in March 2020, a Riot developer explicitly cautioned the Chronoshift devs from continuing their project. In a response to the Chronoshift announcement on Reddit, Riot Gene wrote: “Hijacking to say please don’t do this. We have very simple and easy to read policies around developing products around Riot Games.”
At the time, the developers on Chronoshift have complied withthe cease-and-desist. The former website for the project now has a lengthy statement from the developers, explaining the amount of time they dedicated to the project, and how they worked with no financial compensation. The team was “incredibly disappointed by the way Riot chose to handle this situation,” and that they feel they did their best to respect the law and Riot Games while they had worked on the project.
It is clear that each side of this situation believes they are in the right, but when it comes to copyright law, theIP owner will typically hold the power. While situations like these are complicated, they can often open up larger conversations about company-fanbase dynamics. Legacy servers are also a tricky subject, sometime they are fine and sometimes not. In this case, it was not.
