Capcom has been hit with a lawsuit over Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry as a designer now claims the game company used unlicensed copyrighted photos to build up the characters and environments in both games.
As reported by Polygon, Judy A. Juracek says in a suit filed in Connecticut Friday that Capcom used images from her book, Surfaces, in several games. Originally published in 1996, the book featured 1,200 photos of textures meant for “visual research” for artists. The artist said she must be contacted directly when readers look to license photos, and she claims Capcom never did that, pointing out roughly 80 of her photos she alleges the company used in over 200 instances.
Among the 80 she points to, there’s a shattered glass texture that resembles one in the Resident Evil 4 logo, as well as different background textures in games.
“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,” the suit claimed.
Juracek also alleges that, after a leak last year, she discovered that file names for “at least one of the images from the Capcom hacked files are the same file names as those used on the [Surfaces] CD-ROM.” The lawsuit, too, shows a metal texture that was labeled “ME009” on both her CD and in the leak.
A rep for Capcom reportedly told Polygon that it is “aware of the lawsuit,” having “no further comment.”
