White-Wolf sues Sony

White-wolf game studio, who makes pen and paper RPGs for we nerds who like to think that maybe we aren't nerds just because we have cooler RPGs than the D&D and Magic: The Gathering breed of nerd, is suing Sony on allegations of copyright infringements with the film Underworld, which they are apparently distributing.

You can read the legal brief here

At first I thought that this was going to be a pretty pathetic suit, and that White-wolf must just feel that for some reason they own the copyright for Werewolves and Vampires or something, but if you go through the brief there are apparently a lot of similarities (maybe rip-offs) of some of their supplementary material for Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The apocalypse, as well as the fact that the setting is for all intensive purposes the World of Darkness in which the games are set.

The brief is written in some pretty funny language and has a lot of points that almost want to make you laugh out loud because you wouldn't expect to see something like that in a legal brief, for example:

I wonder if some of the writers for their books wrote up that legal brief because it sounds corny as hell!

Anyway I have to admit that the first time I saw a preview for underworld my first thoughts were "Oh cool it looks like that's going to be a lot like V:TM" there are an awful lot of similarities beyond just the fact that it deals with the same sort of typical horror movie creatures.

 

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[Miss Cleo in da house]Sony will hire the best lawyers, pummel them with countersuits, keep fighting untill this case goes under the carpet and no one will hear about it again, just like the other bajillion cases major corporations are charged with.[/Miss Cleo left da house]

 

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Do the cases really just disappear, or do you just stop following them after a certain point?

 

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Most of them give up or get buried under so much red tape that either they forget about it but largely i just forgot they exist. In the case os Sony Vs creators of bleem - Sony pumled them with so many countersuits that they went bankrupt fighting them. Now only one programmer remains to the Bleem name and he is the creator.

 

what was bleem again?

Hmm wish I had enough cash to law-suit entities to death, heh, man I'd abbuse that so harshly.

 

That is why the RIAA is going after 12 year old girls and others who cannot afford help or to really pay. It is like putting a Pee Wee football team against the Raiders, no way will they win. Big companies own attorneys or hired guns will bury you under a mountain of paperwork, one of their tactics, to burn you out of money, they have more to spend and can focus on you like an ant under the magnifying glass.

 

Wasn't bleem a software that allowed users to play playstation games on a PC?

 

And dreamcast.

A scare tactic...they don't expect any money.....they do it as a scare tactic, which works.

 

Ahh wow bleem sounded like it could have been handy. They shouldn't have sued them to death, they should have bought them and their software, and then started selling it, they could have expanded their demographic by a pretty nice margine! Stupid business men!

 

"In the World of Darkness, the vampires created Silver Nitrate bullets specifically for fighting werewolves. In Underworld, the vampires created Silver Nitrate bullets specifically for fighting werewolves."

In Blade, the half-vampire created Silver Nitrate bullets specifically for fighting vampires.

Big deal, so someone else was inspired by your work to create something similar and now their going to be making some money off it. You should have thought about doing a movie first. As if you don't have enough money.