Unless I seriously misunderstand copyright law, you can’t copyright an idea, only a specific expression of an idea. So either White Wolf has idiot lawyers or something else is going on.
Actually, I believe the Tolkien estate suit led TSR (the makers of D&D) to make those name changes - original D&D called 'em Hobbits and Ents.
Also, the first preview I saw of UNDERWORLD, I said, “huh, cool, a World of Darkness movie.” And you could totally tell how many dots each character in the movie had filled in on his character sheet.
The 90’s Image Comics series Wetworks had a big vampire nation vs werewolf nation component to it. I don’t know when that came out in relation to this Whitewolf stuff, but it’s definitely what I thought of when I first saw Underworld (in a “this is similar” kinda way, not a “this is a ripoff” kinda way).
I think White Wolf had about a half dozen specific points that Sony probably infringed on. But then they had to go for the big money and ballooned their complaints list to 80 with things like “Underworld has werewolves killed by silver. But we invented that.”
They overreached, so they made people overlook any actual infringement and the company as a whole just looks ridiculous.
For once, a hijack actually that has something directly to do with the OP question.
I know! Pass me my garlic and crucifix.
No, sorry, people who don’t understand copyright look ridiculous by making bogus claims like this.
Copyright does not cover ideas, but copyright does cover the overall thrust of a work. If another work can be clearly proven to be quite derivative, to the point that people can say that the work in question was clearly based upon that earlier work and not other elements in the public domain, then it’s a copyright violation. The court has to try to determine how derivative something is by looking at the number of similarities. That what that list was. The whole long list, of which you only selected the ones you find most ridiculous taken out of context. They never said they invented werewolves killed by silver, or that they had copyrights on any of those individual concepts. They were pointing out that you’d have to be blind to not see with the huge list of similarities that the film was clearly based upon the game.
It’s fine that you don’t understand how these lawsuits work, but you do yourself a great disservice by making blatantly false statements about what White Wolf and its lawyers were arguing.
Yes, if someone had actually said what you claimed they said, they’d be ridiculous. But since they never did it’s not a real issue.
But that’s ridiculous. Werewolves have been killed by silver for decades. Making a movie where a werewolf is killed by silver cannot just reference one work, it’s referencing the entire 20th century werewolf canon. Even silver bullets are out because of a fairly well known Stephen King movie called… wait for it… Silver Bullet. Hell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did an episode silver bullets against werewolves while Underworld was in production. Should Joss Whedon sue too?
You can’t point out public domain concepts in your work and then say they’re stolen when they’re used in another work. That’s not how copyright works.
But claiming that somebody else ripped off your vampire story because your vampires were vulnerable to sunlight and their vampires were vulnerable to sunlight is a false simularity - the idea of vampires being vulnerable to sunlight is a common idea (and was probably invented by F.W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen in 1921). You can’t claim somebody stole your ideas because they used the same inspiration you did.