Epic Games wins lawsuit against Silicon Knights, awarded $4.45 Million

Epic Games has emerged the victor in a nearly half-decade civil suit filed against the publisher by Too Human developer Silicon Knights.

Epic Games emerged the victor today in a nearly half-decade civil suit filed against the publisher by Too Human developer Silicon Knights, according to court documents.

Not only did the jury reject all of Silicon Knights' claims, but it found in favor of Epic's counterclaims, awarding the company $4.45 million in damages, according to the judge's order obtained by Polygon.Neither Silicon Knights nor their attorney responded to numerous requests for comment today.

Silicon Knights was ordered to pay $2.65 million of the money for breach of their May 10, 2005 license agreement with Epic, according to the order, and the remaining $1.8 million for infringement of copyrights and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Epic still has 30 days to file a request with the court seeking reimbursement of attorneys' fees and costs from Silicon Knights.

"We are delighted with the jury's verdict and all of the hard work done by the Hunton & Williams legal team," said Jay Andrews, Epic's general counsel.

We have reached out to the North Carolina court, Silicon Knight's attorney and Denis Dyack, but have not received official confirmation of the ruling. We contacted Mark Rein, who confirmed that his tweet was on the level. However, he declined to talk on the record about the ruling in further detail. We're attempting to find those court documents now.

The suit, initially filed in July 2007, claimed Epic Games used funds earned from licensing costs for its Unreal Engine 3 to fund development of Gears of War, rather than pay for improvements to the widely distributed engine. Epic's counterclaim said that Silicon Knights breached the license agreement, misappropriated Epic's trade secrets, and infringed Epic's copyrights in the Unreal Engine 3 code.

The case entered the North Carolina court system May 14th, but not before Judge James Dever III, frustrated by Silicon Knight's failure to provide a damage estimate for their claims, ruled that the maximum amount of compensation the studio could receive would be $1. Apparently, the studio won't even be getting that.