Steven Spielberg and his Dreamworks company stole the plot of last year's Disturbia from the classic 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday in New York.

Spielberg is being sued by a trust which owns the rights to the 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint. It claims that Hitchcock and his lead actor, James Stewart, bought the rights to adapt the book in 1953, prior to making Rear Window. They argue that Spielberg, Dreamworks, parent company Viacom and Universal Pictures should have done the same before starting work on their own version, which was directed by DJ Caruso.

"What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation," the lawsuit reads.

It goes on to claim that Rear Window and Disturbia are "essentially the same". Both feature a protagonist who views what may or may not be a killing through his window. The plot, characters and their interactions are all similar, the suit contends.

"In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story," it reads.

Disturbia starred Shia LaBeouf in the main role and was a sizable box-office hit upon its release, taking $80m (£45.5 million) in the US alone on a budget of just $20m. Critics at the time were quick to note that it had borrowed heavily from the earlier film.

So far neither Spielberg nor Dreamworks have made any comment on the suit, which was filed at a Manhattan federal court by the estate of late film producer Sheldon Abend, who owned the rights to Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint.