Apparently Volkswagen is not alone in getting duped by rogue engineers. As you may recall, Volkswagen is blaming its emissions software scandal on engineers who secretly tinkered with the company's emissions software code unbeknownst to the top brass. Not to be undone by VW, a big Autodesk competitor on Wednesday blamed "an employee" for pilfering the source code from the popular AutoCAD design program and using it to run China-based ZWSoft's competing product, ZWCAD+.

And what a difference a day makes, too. Just months ago, the Chinese company claimed in a copyright infringement lawsuit (PDF) brought by California-based Autodesk that all its code was licensed, open sourced and developed internally. What's more, ZWSoft said the National Copyright Administration of the People's Republic of China had verified the product, too.

But now the company is issuing an apology and claims the entire infringing affair isn't management's fault but the work of a single engineer.

An internal investigation, the company said Wednesday as part of an out-of-court settlement agreement, "revealed that an employee had, in fact, improperly used AutoCAD intellectual property when developing ZWCAD+ and concealed it from ZWSoft’s management team." The company said that it "will enhance our internal management to prevent any intellectual property infringement in the future by instituting additional development safeguards."

As part of agreement between Autodesk and ZWSoft, the Chinese company said it would discontinue marketing ZWCAD+.

"We have stopped selling ZWCAD+ in all markets, and we retract all prior statements suggesting that Autodesk’s lawsuits lack merit and were brought for anti-competitive purposes. We sincerely apologize to Autodesk for the inconvenience that our actions have caused," Truman Du, the company's CEO, said in a statement.

Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.