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White Wolf Sues Sony

Posted by Hemos on from the going-after-the-big-game dept.

etherlad writes "White Wolf, makers of pen-and-paper RPGs such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and author Nancy A. Collins, are suing Sony Pictures, Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment for copyright infringement in the upcoming Underworld movie, which they claim not only is blatantly the World of Darkness with the serial numbers (partially) filed off, but that the movie is obviously ripped off Nancy Collins' novel Love of Monsters, also set in the World of Darkness. There's a PDF of the legal brief floating around, and to me (IANAL) it really looks like WW has a case."

4 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. blah by truffle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm really not impressed with this lawsuit. White wolf has built their products on the mythos and stories that came before them. Anyone who's played Vampire and read Anne Rice will see striking similarities there.

    I'm glad Dugeons and Dragons didn't sue Lord of the Rings when that movie came out. Oh wait, sorry, Dungeons and Dragons is a huge rip off of Lord of the Rings. My mistake.

    To wax geek for a moment, this seems kind of like the movie equivalent of a one-click-shopping lawsuit.

    Anyway, my overall prediction is no money will be paid out, White Wolf is just doing this for publicity. Whatever. Glad I stopped playing their games.

    This is the second time White Wolf has pissed me off, the first time being their desertion of Ars Magica after stealing part of its mythos and inserting it in their World of Darkness games.

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    1. Re:blah by Ceyan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you consider D&D to be a huge ripoff of LOTR, then you have to consider LOTR a huge rip-off of folklore. Or consider that ever robot novel is a ripoff of Asimov's work.

  2. How old are vampires and Shakespeare again? ;p by pocopoco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well WW says they have many unique points of similarity, but I find it hard to believe. Movies have so much less depth than books (and rpg systems and their backgrounds/settings/scenarios, etc). This movie claims to be vampire/werewolf/etc + Romeo & Juliet both of which are free game and open to anyone by now. How much more can there be to this movie that's outside those concepts? So another book combined the two at some later date, that doesn't mean a movie can't do the same using the same public domain stuff.

    1. Re:How old are vampires and Shakespeare again? ;p by Bazzargh · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I was under the impression that Werewolves (or at least, a couple of important werewolf 'facts') are much more recent than vampires or Shakespeare - Curt Siodmak, who wrote the novel and then the screenplay of the 1941 film "The Wolf Man", invented the connection between werewolves and the moon, and their achilles heel of silver bullets. This would probably make for significant parts of werewolf anything being the property of Universal Studios, if anyone. (Werewolf legends date back hundreds of years, but the werewolf we know today is Siodmak's creation.)

      As for Vampires vs Werewolves being original - has noone seen "Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein" (1948)?