A lawsuit filed in the Texas court alleges that Activision and Infinity Ward committed copyright infringement by creating the character Mara in 2019, restarting Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. The lawsuit was filed by writer and photographer Clayton Haugen, who claims that Mara infringes on a character he himself created called “Cade Janus”. The real-life model for Mara and Cade Janus is the same person, Alex Zedra, a Twitch actress and streamer.
Haugen is a writer and photographer who hoped to make a feature film called Renascimento de Novembro and successfully released a short film of the same name in 2017. At that time, he hired actress Alex Zedra to play ‘Cade Janus’, a character destined for the film, and took a series of photos of her on that paper.
Haugen’s lawsuit, as reported by TorrentFreak, claims that those pictures of Cade Janus were placed on the “studio wall” while Infinity Ward created the character Mara for Modern Warfare.
The suit further states that Activision and Infinity Ward hired Zedra, as well as the same makeup artist Haugen had used, and directed the makeup artist “to do the makeup of the talent exactly as she did for Cade Janus de Haugen’s photographs”. He also claims that Activision asked Zedra to borrow from Haugen himself the same clothes and equipment used in ‘Cade Janus’ photo shoot.
Part of the infringement allegations relates not only to Mara’s appearance in the game, but to the photos taken with Zedra as part of Modern Warfare marketing in 2019. Haugen claims that these photos, seen below, are “substantially similar”:
Predicting whether a process like this has legs looks like a fool’s game. If you hire an actress to play two characters, those characters will be very similar. If both are characters that use combat equipment, they will be even more similar. If Cade Janus’ photos were specifically used as a reference, then maybe? What I know.
The complaint, which you can read in full here, argues that Haugen has “the right to recover all monetary remedies for the Defendants’ infringement, including all of their profits attributable to the infractions, to the fullest extent permitted …”. The lawsuit points out that Activision said in late 2019 that the game earned more than $ 1 billion (about £ 731 million) in revenue.
As an aside, the suit mentions that Haugen provided the story for Bruce Willis’ 2020 film Hard Kill.
I contacted Activision and Haugen to comment and will update the story if any of the parties respond.