Sony, Jaffe sued over alleged God of War copyright infringement

by Alexander Sliwinski on Sep 17th 2008 3:00PM

Sony Computer Entertainment America and game designer David Jaffe are being sued for alleged copyright infringement over God of War. GamePolitics has Sony's statement on the matter, as well as the complaint, which will be heard in US District Court in California. The crux of the case is that Jonathan Bissoon-Dath, who wrote a screenplay called Olympiad, and Jennifer Barette-Herzog, who designed a map for the former's work, believe God of War was based on their work submitted to Sony Pictures in 2002.

The plaintiffs cite numerous similarities between the two works (like, both stories have bridges going over bottomless chasms), while Sony maintains that Greek mythology is in the public domain and the alleged similarities are "inaccurate, incomplete, abstracted and/or misleading."

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Tags: david-jaffe, god-of-war, lawsuit, legal, PS2, PS3, PSP, sony

Reader Comments (60)

"The Federal Court Systems have abandoned me..."

Nice rant, fanboy. If only you'd bothered to notice that MS didn't invent any of their online capabilities, either. They stole ideas from existing PC services, sometimes buying up service providers wholesale to get full access to their code and infrastructure.

@Sheppy

The PSX is an entirely different thing from the PlayStation.

Playstations retail insignia was PSX. It's on every game box. It was the codename for the standalone CDrom system. So in my mind, that DVR PS2 hybrid in Japan isn't the PSX.

@Bass

"Nice rant, fanboy. If only you'd bothered to notice that MS didn't invent any of their online capabilities, either."

Did he say they did? If you're going to reply at least reply to something that he actually stated.

Seriously if he was going to sue over his this "Infringement" why didn't he do it with the release of God of War? You know the first game that came out a few years ago. He's obviously yet another greedy person trying to cash on Sony's success. I mean sure he probably felt that he has a pretty good chance with all the lawsuits that Sony had to dish money out on...but what big corporation doesn't get sued these days? He obviously doesn't have a real case and this won't be news when he loses the case...nor will we be shocked.

@Phantom

Sony steals because they can't come up with their own ideas. Yes, Playstation is good. But, saying they made everything better is a little much. I find the Playstation controllers to be one of the most uncomfortable controller ever. The analog sticks were worse than the 64s just because of the position.