... and my biggest problem is I don't know how much of their book was an original compilation and interpretation of existing data, and how much of that had been pulled together before.
If I spent ages going through lots of books on Egyptology and came up with a theory about pyramids, seasons, sunrise times etc. then a lot of it would have been scattered through all the other books but perhaps I'd have come up with a new insight (even if all the evidence was around before). If someone then made a film and it used the same stuff I had, it would be hard to prove whether they had stolen my work or whether they'd used the same source material and came to the same conclusions. That's pretty much the same as here.
I don't know the White Wolf stuff well enough to know whether there was mor e than a passing resemblance with Underworld, but I assume from your statement that Sony won? In the original complaint, White Wolf & Nancy Collins claimed "over 60 points of unique similarity between Underworld and their work". However after five minutes of web searching, I can't find any subsequent update to that case ... did it get dropped? Is it still ongoing? Most of the individual points that I can find referenced (e.g. fast vampires, strong vampires etc.) are part of the standard vampire mythos, but (unless you steal actual character names) it's always hard to identify plagiarism/copyright theft aside from seeing how many points of similarity there are with the alleged source and how many there are with other non-copyright documents (stealing from many people is no better, but much harder to prove!)
I've read both ...
If I spent ages going through lots of books on Egyptology and came up with a theory about pyramids, seasons, sunrise times etc. then a lot of it would have been scattered through all the other books but perhaps I'd have come up with a new insight (even if all the evidence was around before). If someone then made a film and it used the same stuff I had, it would be hard to prove whether they had stolen my work or whether they'd used the same source material and came to the same conclusions. That's pretty much the same as here.
I don't know the White Wolf stuff well enough to know whether there was mor e than a passing resemblance with Underworld, but I assume from your statement that Sony won? In the original complaint, White Wolf & Nancy Collins claimed "over 60 points of unique similarity between Underworld and their work". However after five minutes of web searching, I can't find any subsequent update to that case ... did it get dropped? Is it still ongoing? Most of the individual points that I can find referenced (e.g. fast vampires, strong vampires etc.) are part of the standard vampire mythos, but (unless you steal actual character names) it's always hard to identify plagiarism/copyright theft aside from seeing how many points of similarity there are with the alleged source and how many there are with other non-copyright documents (stealing from many people is no better, but much harder to prove!)