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Disney is locked into quite a few legal battles right now. One of them is over, but the results are not particularly favorable for the entertainment giant.
Disney Legal Battles
It seems as if a string of legal battles is something that comes with the territory of being a large company. And Disney is certainly no exception. By now many people have heard about the legal battles between DeSantis and Disney and the DeSantis Board and Disney.
But, others are cropping up all the time including a lawsuit revolving around The Little Mermaid, a lawsuit involving a Disney waterslide, and one that involves a man accusing Disney of stealing his ideas before he has them. And now we have the resolution of a lawsuit involving the 2017 live-action hit Beauty and the Beast.
Beauty and The Beast Lawsuit
This infringement lawsuit hinges on the motion-capture technology Disney used in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast live-action film. The lawsuit claims that Disney used Rearden LLC’s MOVA Contour software without permission to create the special effects that generated the face of the Beast.
Rearden had worked with Disney to provide this type of technology for other films prior to Beauty and the Beast such as Tron: Legacy. However, Disney selected Digital Domain 3.0 to work with on Beauty and the Beast.
To put it in simple terms, the issue is that Rearden claims Digital Domain 3.0 did not actually own the technology used for Beauty and the Beast. Rearden maintains that an employee illegally provided the technology to other companies such as Digital Domain 3.0.
Rearden also claims that Disney should have known the technology did not belong to Digital Domain 3.0. Disney denied the allegations.
The Decision
Rearden initially requested Disney pay out a huge stare of the film’s profits, totaling $38 million in copyright damages. A jury did find that Disney now owes the company damages.
However, the amount of those damages is far less significant than what Rearden was looking for. The jury awarded over $250,000 in damages and recommended that Disney turn over $345,000 of the film’s profits as well.
The jury recommends Disney pay nearly $600,000 to Rearden
There are other similar battles surrounding other movies using the same technology. It will be interesting to see how those pan out.
What do you think of the jury’s decision to award damages in this lawsuit? Let us know in the comments.
Source: Rearden LLC v. The Walt Disney Company (4:17-cv-04006)
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