So White Wolf is suing Sony for copyright infringement re: Underworld and Vampire: the Masquerade.
… alleging 17 counts of copyright infringement for the film Underworld, set for release on September 19. White Wolf alleges that Underworld characters, theme and setting are based on White Wolf’s award winning games Vampire: The Masquerade? and Werewolf: The Apocalypse™, both set in White Wolf’s fictional World of Darkness?.
Plaintiffs claim over 60 points of unique similarity between Underworld and their work. “Ours is a huge fictional world, supported by over 200 volumes of fictional material,” asserts Mike Tinney, White Wolf’s President.
Well, yeah… I imagine that when you rip of use material from EVERY VAMPIRE AND WEREWOLF TROPE ever introduced in any medium and mash it into 200 fucking books over the course of the last decade, most folks won’t be able to swing an undead cat without hitting something you’ve already ripped off for your own purposes.
One of the “copyright infringements” from the PDF copy of the legal claim:
‘In WoD, vampires sometimes call each other “Vee,” short for vampire. In Underworld, there is a vampire character named Vee.
One sweatshop writer working for movie studios wrote a ‘love story between a vamp and were’ that came off as being very much like a similar story idea written by a sweatshop writer working for a game company? I’m shocked.
Shocked, I tell you.
A great comment on this from Tragic Glass:
Mr. Tinney, pay attention. Vampires were fighting werewolves in movies in the 1930s. Oh, and here’s my personal favorite example of this concept. The October 5, 1987 episode of The Real Ghostbusters. The episode was titled “No One Comes To Lupusville.” It featured a town of werewolves battling a town of vampires. It was written by a better writer than has ever graced the pages of any White Wolf game: J. Michael Straczynski
I don’t know if that’s funnier than the “Vee” claim or not, but it’s certainly worth a chortle.