3 Count: Motion Captured

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1: US Jury Says Disney Owes $600k in Motion-Capture Copyright Trial

First off today, Blake Brittain at Reuters reports that a jury has ordered Disney to pay some $600,000 in damages for its use of a third party’s copyright-infringing motion capture lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed by the company Rearden LLC, which makes the MOVA Countour software that is used to map human faces onto animated characters. According to Rearden, some of their employees took copies of MOVA with them as they left the company to form a competitor, Digital Domain 3.0 (DD3). They then alleged that Disney used DD3’s infringing software to create their 2017 film Beauty and the Beast.

The jury found in favor of Rearden. However, it only awarded roughly $600,000 in combined actual damages and profits. Rearden had been seeking some $38 million in damages, based on the estimated $1.25 billion the film made. As such, a Disney representative stated that they were “gratified” by the jury award, which rejected the full request for damages.

2: ‘No Copyright in Ideas’: Delhi HC Rejects Interim Plea Against Broadcast of Yash Raj Films’ ‘Shamshera’

Next up today, Express News Service reports that The Delhi High Court has dismissed a request for injunction against Yash Raj Films, which sought to block any release or distribution of the film Shamshera.

The case was filed by Bikramjeet Singh Bhullar, who claimed that the film infringed on an earlier script that he wrote. However, the judge analyzed the two works and found that there were significant differences between them, prompting him to dismiss the application for an injunction.

The judge noted that there is no copyright protection in the ideas of the script. He further noted that and the similarities between the works were things that could not be protected by copyright, such as the choice of locations. Though the injunction was rejected, the case is continuing, with the next hearing scheduled for January.

3: Reckless DMCA Deindexing Pushes NASA’s Artemis Towards Black Hole

Finally today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that a series of misguided copyright takedown notices may result in information about NASA’s upcoming moon mission, named Artemis 2, becoming impossible to find on Google.

The takedowns were filed with Google by DMCA Privacy Prevention, a copyright protection service that is representing an adult film star identified as Artemis. Though the takedown does feature pirate links where a takedown would be appropriate, many of the links are non-infringing websites that are talking about the Artemis 2 mission.

The notices were filed with Google. As such, the pages won’t necessarily go offline, but instead may be removed from Google’s search index, making them difficult to locate.

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