Stealing image copyrights, the creator of Resident Evil was sued for more than 270 billion VND

The lawsuit was filed last Friday in Connecticut, designer/photographer Judy A. Juracek alleges. Capcom stole my work to put it to use in various games such as Resident Evil , Devil May Cry,… In total, the developer took 80 photos, the compensation value is about 12 million USD (276 billion VND).
​

​

In 1996, Juracek published Surfaces: Visual Research for Artists, Architects, And Designers with the content of more than 1,000 high-quality photographs taken by the author himself. The book also comes with a CD with digital copies of these pictures. The purpose of the book is to support research for designers, artists and architects. In the lawsuit, Juracek alleges Capcom took these images and used them in many of its games from 20 years ago. The images appeared in the original Devil May Cry and the 2002 remake of Resident Evil.

To prove it, Juracek provided more than 100 pages of documents to easily compare the correlation between her work and the images contained in the game. At least 80 different photos from Juracek’s Surface book were used by Capcom and this was of course not authorized by the female photographer. If that’s not convincing enough, Juracek is still in possession of internal Capcom documents due to a hack that occurred from 2020. Part of this document is named exactly like the file on the CD from his book. she.
​

Juracek is asking for damages of $2,500-25,000 per photo, totaling up to $12 million. In addition, Juracek also requested attorneys’ fees as well as an injunction against Capcom’s continued use of its images to protect exclusivity. The matter is clearly quite serious when the similarity between the images is indisputable. Speaking to Polygon, Capcom said it was aware of the lawsuit but declined to comment further. Juracek has requested a jury trial and is awaiting a court response.​