Photographer and designer Judy A. Juracek filed a lawsuit in a Connecticut court On Friday, alleging that Capcom stole her work and used it in Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry and other Capcom games.

Juracek published a photo book called Surfaces in 1996. The CD that came with this book contained the same photos and could be used for commercial projects in exchange for licenses. However, although Capcom directly benefited from many of these photos, Juracek did not apply for a license. Jurasec says at least 80 photos were identified as references in Capcom games.

Many of the images jurasec exemplies in the petition are photographs taken from non-public places that the artist entered with special permission, and some of them no longer exist (e.g. a crime glass painting he took in Italy in the 1990s). So there’s no way Capcom went and took these photos himself once.

That broken glass sample was used in the Resident Evil 4 logo. “After the photos of Juracek designing broken glass and interior manor doors in Italy, it is impossible to believe that Capcom artists created the same broken glass layout and interior design image for use in the logo without taking advantage of Juracek’s photographs,” the petition says.

Some of the evidence jurasec presents comes from the Capcom data leak in 2020. Among the leaked information were high-resolution photos used in Resident Evil and other games.

You can see a few examples below, and from what I’ve seen, it’s very difficult for Jurasec to lose this case, but whether Capcom is going to make a statement is a question of whether he’s going to make that part.