George Romero Lawsuit Against Capcom Dismissed by Judge

Remember back in February when New Line Cinema and the MKR group who own the rights to filmmaker George A. Romero’s films decided to sue Capcom for copyright infringement over their survival horror game Dead Rising? In case you can’t recall, they felt that the game was a blatant rip-off of Romero’s classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead.

The lawsuit, however, has been thrown out of court by U.S. magistrate judge Richard Seeborg, who felt that a storyline involving survivors hanging out in a shopping mall during a zombie apocalypse was too vague to be copyright protected:

“[The MKR Group (producers of the film)] has not identified any similarity between Dead Rising and any protected element of Dawn of the Dead. Rather, the few similarities MKR has alleged are driven by the wholly unprotectable concept of humans battling zombies in a mall during a zombie outbreak. To the extent that Dead Rising may be deemed to posses a theme it is confined to the killing of zombies in the process of attempting to unlock the cause of the zombie infestation. The social commentary MKR draws from Dawn of the Dead, in other words, appears totally absent from the combat focus found in Dead Rising.”

So there ya have it. No similarities between Dawn of the Dead and Dead Rising. I suppose this also means that there are no similarities between the scientific experiments on people which turned them to zombies in Dead Rising and the movie Day of the Dead. If that were the case, there would be a lot of people being sued because it seems that the military or some rouge scientist is always genicially altering people in games and movies.

(Thanks GamesIndustry.biz)