Capcom and artist ‘resolve’ lawsuit regarding alleged stolen photos in Devil May Cry, Resident Evil

polygon.com:

Capcom games like Resident Evil 4and Devil May Cry allegedly used unlicensed copyrighted photos extensively in its games to build out environments, details, and even the Resident Evil4 logo, according to a new lawsuit filed Friday.

Designer Judy A. Juracek filed her initial complaint in a Connecticut court on Friday. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Capcom used photos from her copyrighted book, Surfaces, in multiple games, including Resident Evil4, Devil May Cry, and other Capcom games. Surfaces is a collection of 1,200 photographs of textures that Juracek photographed herself; the book is intended to be used for “visual research” for artists, architects, and designers, according to the book’s description. It was originally published in 1996. The collection comes with a CD-ROM of the images — but Juracek said she requires people to license images from her for commercial use by contacting her directly. Juracek said in the lawsuit that Capcom never contacted her for a license.

Juracek pointed out at least 80 photographs that are used in different scenarios across Capcom’s games, with more than 100 pages of documentation. One instance called out in the lawsuit is regarding a shattered glass texture used in the Resident Evil 4 logo.

Juracek said she took the photo of glass in Italy. “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,” she said in the lawsuit.

In more than 100 pages of supporting case documents, Juracek pointed out more than 200 instances of her photographs allegedly being used in Capcom’s