White Wolf Finally Snaps

[jazzfish]

Press release: "White Wolf, Inc. and Nancy A. Collins yesterday filed suit in US District court in Atlanta, Georgia against defendants Sony Pictures, Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment, alleging 17 counts of copyright infringement for the film Underworld, set for release on September 19."

From another press release yesterday, "Judge J. Owen Forrester did not grant the requested temporary restraining order, citing a handful of mitigating circumstances, most notably the plaintiff's inability to post a bond in excess of ten million dollars."

I forget to check my net news for three days, and I get stuff like this. Jeez.

I believe Penny Arcade has said all there really is to say on the subject.
(PA has a copy of the legal complaint too, if you're really interested. What they're asking for: destruction of all copies of Underworld, all profits from Underworld, $1,650,000 for copyright infringement, "an assessment of three times the Defendants' profits from Underworld and related merchandise" and "an assessment of three times the damages sustained by White Wolf" which I don't comprehend, "costs of this action" which is apparently separate from legal fees (they ask for those too, though), and several times asking for damages as assessed by a jury. Yowza.)

Comments

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

While Sonja Blue is near and dear to my heart, I think it's kind of funny that the plaintiffs believe that any of their work or the contents of the movie are terribly original. It's R&J x D fer chrissakes. What WW should be doing is putting commercials in front of the movie, instead of making themselves out to be litigious whiners. $.02 :)

[mneme]

Eh -- from the action, it looks like they may have a point -- if you assume that copyright is a valid law to begin with, Underworld far more obviously a rip-off of White Wolf's work as, say, Feist's Riftwar stuff is of Tekumel. (more particularly, while a bunch of their points are ways in which vampires are normally portrayed, WoD's portrayal of werewolves is actually quite distinctive and relevant, and they list both a the ways they differ from the vampire "canon" (in the same ways Underworld does) and the ways Underworld's plot follows that of a specific WoD novel.

Of course, the creator of Penny Arcade is -still- a jerk; one reason I've never had an interest in reading his strip.