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Disney Facing VFX Firm's Injunction Bid on Three Blockbuster Films (hollywoodreporter.com)
From a report: 'Guardians of the Galaxy,' 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' and 'Beauty and the Beast' are now under the microscope for use of facial capture technology. Upping the stakes over a technology called "performance motion capture," Rearden LLC is going after The Walt Disney Company in a lawsuit filed this week. The plaintiff, a firm incubated by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman, is demanding an injunction prohibiting Disney from distributing Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Beauty and the Beast. The new lawsuit comes a year after Rearden scored a startling injunction against two Chinese firms that purchased allegedly stolen technology known as MOVA, which was being licensed by Digital Domain 3.0. At the time, some legal observers were reading the ruling as notice to Hollywood studios that the facial motion capture technology was out of play. According to Rearden's latest lawsuit in California federal court, Disney didn't listen. "Disney used the stolen MOVA Contour systems and methods, made derivative works, and reproduced, distributed, performed, and displayed at least Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Beauty and the Beast, in knowing or willfully blind violation of Rearden Mova LLC's intellectual property rights."
No. They are trying to hijack the ownership rights of works created using software. If this passes legal muster, the implications are very ugly. Like "copyrights on APIs" kind of ugly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is also contract law. If the contract between two businesses states that the company should get royalties or attribution for works produced by the software, then it's entirely possible that they are due royalties and an injunction against further distribution/sales would be possible.
This is entirely possible under e.g. Creative Commons. Let's say you license something under Creative Commons with Attribution and Disney uses your work without attribution, you would have the right to ask a judge to pull all media (DVD, BluRay etc) and rework it so they put your name in the credits.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Is it wrong that I feel amused that this is happening to Disney, after all Disney has done to ruin copyright law?
The Hollywood Reporter has done a series of good articles on this... worth searching through what's been reported over the last year, it's amazing. There's a mysteriously killed Chinese billionaire, a Silicon Valley inventor giving away his IP because he thinks it's worthless (and it was worthless until the Oscar won by the guys using it), and a ton of extremely shady lawyers.
Both Perlman and LaSalle have been screwed over here, and they both deserve some of the blame for this. Neither one appears to have understood how to commercialize the technology. They were good friends, but they were not able to separate the ups and downs of friendship from their business relationship.