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Intellectual Property Law

: Video Game Law Blog

Dark, Extreme Violence Saves God of War from Copyright Infringement

By Chris Bennett, Tudor Carsten, Michael R. Coburn, Sarah Dale-Harris, Pablo Guzman, Danielle (Dani) Lemon, Chris Metcalfe and David Spratley

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Submitted by Dan Chapman, Articled Student

The U.S. Federal Court last week dismissed a case against Sony and lead designer of God of War, David Jaffe. The plaintiffs, alleging similarities between events in God of War and their own copyrighted materials were unable to established that specific, concrete elements of the ideas and expressions in God of War were similar to their own.

The court held that the "plots are similar only at a level of abstraction that is barely meaningful, if at all," and that the egregious "dark and extremely violent" bloodletting in God of War made it thematically very different from the plaintiff's works. The court found that similarities between the dialogue, mood, settings, pace, characters and sequence of events in God of War and the plaintiffs' works were insufficient to overcome a motion for summary judgment.

The court ruled that general plot ideas are unprotected by copyright law, and elements of literary and artistic work, that have existed in literature for many years (and millenia in this case) cannot be copyrighted. Only when a particular sequence of these "unprotectable" elements are put together into a plotline however, the end product can be copyrighted. While many common elements were shared between both God of War and the plaintiffs' works, these elements were simply found to be too far out of sequence to be granted judicial protection.

It would appear as though Kratos, can continue relieving his hapless adversaries of their heads with his "blades of Chaos" without fear of legal intervention.

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Full post as published by Video Game Law Blog on March 24, 2010 (boomark / email).