It ain’t looking good.
Remember how, a while back, Capcom got hacked, and ultimately that hack led to a massive leak? Well, if you somehow guessed at the time that it would also lead to a copyright infringement lawsuit leveled against Capcom, pat yourself on the back, Nostradamus. Because that is exactly what has happened.
Designer Judy A. Juracek alleges that Capcom used images from her book, Surfaces, in many of their games. Notably, Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry are among the games that are claimed to contain her work. Surfaces is a book Juracek made to be “visual research” for artists, architects, and designers; it contains over 1200 photos Juracek took herself of various, well, surfaces. Notably, the book, originally published in 1996, came with a CD ROM of all of the images in the book. That said, Juracek requires anyone that wishes to use these images to license them for commercial work by contacting her directly.
That, uh, clearly didn’t happen here. Juracek identified at least 80 photos that had been used across multiple Capcom games, with over 100 pages of documentation. One example is the shattered glass texture in the Resident Evil 4 logo:
Per the documentation:
More specifically, it is hard to imagine that Juracek would take a photo of shattered glass in Italy and interior mansion door design and that Capcom artists would reproduce the exact same pattern of shattered glass in a logo and interior door design without benefit of Juracek’s photographs.
If you thought it stopped at logos, though, you were sadly mistaken. The overwhelming number of these images were used in full as textures in games in the Resident Evil and Devil May Cry (hilariously referred to, several times by clerical error, as Devil May Care) games, with some being edited for effect or desired outcome.
They got a fair amount of mileage out of that goat head.
Most damning is the fact that the Capcom leak actually helped expose this. Among the leaked information were “high resolution” images used as art assets for these games. As a mater of fact, these were images from the Surfaces CD ROM; the file names hadn’t even been changed in at least one case.
The file names for at least one of the images from the Capcom hacked files are the same file names as those used on the CD-ROM.
For example, the file name for a metal texture image from the CD-ROM is “ME009” and Capcom has ME009 stored in its files under that name and Capcom used this photograph in its game(s).
The lawsuit also cites another recent suit against Capcom over monsters used in Resident Evil Village. Dutch filmmaker Richard Raaphorst, thanks to a fan, found out that Capcom had used one of his monster designs from Frankenstein’s Army as the basis for Village‘s Sturm.
Juracek’s lawyers are asking the court for $12 million in damages plus attorney’s fees over Copyright infringement, as well as between $2500 to $25,000 per photograph for the false copyright management and removal of copyright management on the photos. As there are 80 known photos in question, that can easily tally up to $200,000 to $2 million. In addition, there’s also the Prayer for Relief, of which item B is particularly nasty:
WHEREFORE, Plaintiff prays for judgment as follows:
A. An order immediately and permanently enjoining Defendants, its officers, members, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and all persons in active concert or participating with any of them, from utilizing any of Plaintiff’s copyrights in any way.
B. Direct Defendants to destroy each and every copy of all games, products and other content including Plaintiff’s photographs.
C. That Defendant be ordered to pay to Plaintiff damages sustained as a result of the activities complained of herein, including actual damages, profits, exemplary damages and if elected, statutory damages.
D. That Defendant be ordered to pay increased damages due to its willful infringement.
E. That Defendant be ordered to pay Plaintiff’s reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs incurred in this action.
F. That Plaintiff be awarded such other and further relief as may be contemplated by statute law and/or equity and such other and further relief as the Court may deem just and proper.
Needless to say, Capcom’s probably going to want this to go away, and may well attempt to settle out of court.
Source: Polygon
About Author
