SNK and Square Enix are in a dispute, and we don’t mean in a friendly cross-over fighter, either. SNK recently filed a criminal lawsuit against Square Enix for usage of SNK’s intellectual property without prior consent from the company.
To summarize what’s been going on, it appears that Square Enix have infringed on numerous intellectual properties of SNK Playmore through their popular manga, called High Score Girl, which is about arcade gaming featuring various video game characters.
According to SNK Playmore, the infringement came to light when the anime adaptation of the arcade manga was in the works, and the animation studio contacted SNK to ask about their usage of characters and music in the show. As it turns out, SNK’s content has been used in the manga all this time without their consent.
While they don’t go too far into detail about what exactly was used in the High Score Girl manga, SNK Playmore claims that there were over 100 instances where characters from the King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown were used without consent.
SNK Playmore say they attempted to contact Square Enix on the matter, but did not receive a proper response, which eventually led to their filing of a criminal lawsuit against the company through the Osaka police back in May of this year.
Yesterday, on August 5, the Osaka police raided Square Enix’s office located in Shinjuku, Tokyo, along with other concerned parties, which violated copyright infringement laws.
Investigations are currently ongoing and more details will be available upon further interrogations and evidence inspection.
