A Photographer Is Suing Capcom for $12 Million for Over 200 Instances of Copyright Infringement
There’s a big myth out there that if you “alter” a portion of an image, the image is longer subject to copyright laws. Crop it down, scale it, change its colour, modify a few pixels here and there and you can claim “transformative” under Fair Use… Right? Wrong, as games creator Capcom is finding out after they were hit with a $12,000,000 lawsuit.
Polygon reports that the suit was filed by designer Judy A. Juracek who alleges that Capcom has used photos from her copyrighted book, Surfaces, in a number of games, including Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry and other games. Surfaces is a collection of photographs of more than 1,200 textures, designed as a “visual research” reference for artists.
Juracek’s book was published in 1996 and came with an accompanying CD-ROM containing the textures, allowing artists to easily view them digitally on-screen as a reference. Importantly, however, the book doesn’t come with a license to actually use the images for commercial use. They’re purely for visual reference. Juracek says that she requires that anybody needing commercial use contact her directly for a license. She says that Capcom never purchased a license or even contacted her, but cites at least 80 photographs of hers that were used across Capcom’s games in more than 200 instances.
