Cognosphere, better known to most of us as HoYoVerse, has opened a new front in its long-running war against leakers by suing Jianuo “HomDGCat” Zhou, the operator of the HomDGCat wiki. The lawsuit, available via Aftermath, alleges that Zhou “has engaged in a sustained, coordinated campaign to steal and publicly disseminate Cognosphere’s confidential, trade secret information and copyrighted materials” related to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.
The lawsuit claims HomDGCat obtains content for the wiki “through improper and illegal means,” including asking testers to violate their NDAs and provide access to beta packages. In one social media message, included in the filing, HomDGCat wrote, “If you are in Genshin Impact beta or Star Rail beta, and would like to provide files to assist me in my datamining and research, you are welcome to message me at t.me/hom_dgcat. I will inform you of how to get the beta’s download link, which is all I need. I will not know your identity and will not leak the links you give me to anyone else.”
Asking people to spill the beans seems like fairly small potatoes to me—and honestly, I feel like if you break your NDA because I asked you to, well, that’s on you, pal. But beyond that, Cognosphere alleges that HomDGCat then circumvented the systems used to protect the material—the datamining used to actually extract the information—which is a bigger deal.
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Interestingly, Cognosphere says it sent multiple takedown requests to Zhou, and he actually responded at least once, on December 29—but it was not the response Cognosphere was looking for. Zhou said he disagreed with the claims against him and would only comply with some of Cognosphere’s demands; he did not agree to stop datamining, and “all or nearly all” of the materials posted to the HomDGCat wiki are still up.
