We don’t remember the Snoopy storyline where Charlie Brown and co. end up in a legal copyright battle, but that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment. Lee Mendelson Film Productions (the owner of “certain intellectual property” related to the Peanuts IP) has issued a legal complaint against publisher GameMill, accusing the latter of copyright infringement in Snoopy & the Great Mystery Club’s score.

Okay, that’s a lot to digest, and there’s every chance you’ve never heard of Snoopy & the Great Mystery Club, so let’s break it down. GameMill published the puzzle adventure game on the Switch eShop last year to relatively little fanfare. Seven months after release, it seems the Peanuts owner has noticed some familiar tunes in the game’s score, and what do you know, those tunes were not licensed.

In the complaint (brought to our attention on X by @tech_gaming), Lee Mendelson Film Productions provides a breakdown of several songs in the ‘Great Mystery Club’ soundtrack, pointing to similarities between them and the original Vince Guaraldi score. This, it claims, is proof that GameMill “created music substantially similar to (and thus infringing upon) the Guaraldi Compositions without authorization.”

The studio has even pulled in musicologist Dr. Ethan Lustig to “provide an initial analysis of the musicological similarities between the Guaraldi Compositions and the music in the GameMill Game,” which are listed throughout the document.

The comparisons pair Guaraldi’s ‘Linus and Lucy’ and ‘Skating’ (with which any A Charlie Brown Christmas fans will be immediately familiar) with a whole host of the game’s tracks, including ‘Success’, ‘Town Theme’ and ‘Schoolhouse Theme’. Lustig points to various “musicological similarities” between the original score and the 2025 soundtrack, noting the “specific rhythmic (and metric) instantiation”, “identical note events (same pitch and rhythm)”, and other comparisons which are presented as evidence of copyright infringement.

And for those wondering, yes, the complaint states that GameMill did license the rights to the Peanuts characters for the game, though it “did not license the rights to the Guaraldi Compositions from Plaintiff”.

Lee Mendelson Film Productions is requesting damages “to be determined at trial” for the copyright infringements, which, the complaint states, are currently estimated to exceed $300,000.

This demand for jury trial was submitted last week on 20th May 2026 alongside lawsuits directed at the Federal Government, Heritage Auctions and belt buckle brand Buckle-Down for similar musical copyright infringement. We have reached out to GameMill for a comment on the complaint and will be keeping an eye out for developments in the coming months.

What do you make of this case? Let us know in the comments.