Farmville might be the biggest thing on Facebook since privacy violations, but maybe not for very much longer – the developer has just been accused of nicking the source code for the game from another company.
California-based dev SocialApps has filed litigation against Zynga for “copyright infringement, violation of trade secrets, breach of written contract, breach of implied-in-fact contract, and breach of confidence”.
According to a report over on Patent Arcade, the lawsuit contends that Zynga persuaded SocialApps to share the source code for its own social networking game, myFarm, then simply made off with it.
SocialApps is suing now suing Zynga for a permanent injunction against distributing Farmville, as well as statutory and punitive damages, totalling over $600 000.
It’s not the first time Zynga has faced similar accusations– shortly after launching Farmville, sceptical critics pointed out its uncanny resemblance to Slashkey’s Farm Town, a MySpace / Facebook game which is pretty much exactly the same as Farmville.
Perhaps more importantly, why does anybody play this crap?
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