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Now that the Beijing Olympic Committee has finished cracking down on non-licensed fuwa, maybe they can send a team over to Sohu.com to break some kneecaps. The mega-portal appears to have been caught with its pants down stealing flash games from independent (read: poorer than BOCOG members) games designers:

Here’s the story more-or-less in full from its source: The Pencil Farm. You can click on the link there for more details including some hilarious screen comparisons showing the harmonious pro-Olympics version of the game side-by-side with the original.

The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

I did some research and it seems that the web site was created by Sohu.com, the company that last year busted Google for plagiarizing from one if its products. At the time Sohu made three requests of Google: that they stop offering the software for download as quickly as possible, that they make an apology, and that they discuss compensation for the offense. I’m currently considering my legal options, but I think these three things sound like reasonable requests to make of Sohu.

The Beijing Olympic Committee has also not been lenient with copyright infringers. Back in October the director of the State Intellectual Property Office, Tian Lipu, pledged to prevent Olympic piracy. Indeed, the Olympic web site even has a page set up where you can report infringement of intellectual property rights. Evidently, they are slightly less concerned when The Olympics infringes on the rights of others.

This is several times more delicious than when Hanban pirated foreign media content for its boondoggle of a Chinese-learning website. I’m personally indifferent to the Olympics as an event (running and jumping aren’t high on my A-list of activities that should be state-subsidized), but a full year of stories like this is just the sort of thing that could make me a convert.