Sony responds

I’m ready to reassert my position as the foremost White Wolf v. Sony blogger, if it please the court.

I got myself a login for the federal court system, and soon thereafter procured a copy of Sony’s response to the complaint. (Thanks to Chris for hosting.) I don’t speak lawyer, but I think it mostly says “We have no idea what your game says vampires and werewolves do, and we did not copy our ideas from you.”

Some fun excerpts:

61. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 61 of the Complaint. Defendants admit the second sentence of Paragraph 61. Defendants state further that to the extent any colorable similarity exists between Plaintiffs’ works and the Underworld movie in this respect, any such similarity concerns material that is not original, not protectable expression, lies within the public domain, and/or constitutes unprotectable ideas or scenes a faire.

Paragraph 61 in the original complaint deals with vampires awakening from extended sleep in a mummified condition. “Scenes a faire,” as I understand it, are ideas that are inherent to the conventional telling of a given sort of story.

67. Defendants are without information and knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments in the first sentence of Paragraph 67 of the Complaint. Defendants deny the second sentence of the Paragraph 67 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that the Underworld movie contains no character named “Vee.” Defendants state further that one scene in an early version of an Underworld script contained one extremely minor character named “Vee.”

There’s a fair amount of stuff like that; if I had to guess, I’d say that Sony is trying to make a case that White Wolf was working from a very early and irrelevant copy of the script.

116. Defendants deny the first sentence of Paragraph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that Plaintiff Collins’ work The Love of Monsters speaks for itself. Defendants deny the second sentence of Paragaph 116 of the Complaint in the form and manner averred and state that one werewolf character at one point in the Underworld movie refers to vampires as “Bloods.”

And so on.