Less than a month after Frankenstein’s Army director Richard Raaphorst accused Capcom of plagiarizing his monster designs in Resident Evil Village, the publisher has been sued by an artist for allegedly stealing her photos for use in Resident Evil and Devil May Cry games.
As spotted by Polygon, designer Judy A. Juracek filed a complaint in a Connecticut court on Friday. She presented hundreds of pages of documentation showing at least 80 photographs that she captured that were used in over 200 instances without her permission in Capcom games. One example includes a distinct shattered glass photo that Juracek took in Italy, later used in Resident Evil 4‘s logo.
“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 design without benefit of Juracek’s photographs,” reads the complaint.
The most incriminating evidence comes from last year’s Capcom hack, which leaked artwork used in games like Resident Evil. The file name of at least one of the leaked images is the same exact file name for the same image in the CD ROM of Juracek’s copyrighted photography book, Surfaces. In other words, it looks like Capcom lifted the copyrighted image from Surfaces, slightly altered it for use without Juracek’s express permission, and didn’t change the file name.
When reached for a comment, a Capcom representative told Polygon that the company is “aware of the lawsuit” and has “no further comment.”
[Source: Polygon]