3 Count: Fire Flower Power

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1: ‘Moana’ Director Scoffs at Plagiarism Claims at Copyright Infringement Trial

First off today, Edvard Pettersson at Courthouse News Service reports that John Musker, one of the co-creators of the Disney film Moana, testified at trial that the movie was based solely on internal work and research, not an earlier project.

Animator and author Buck Woodall filed the lawsuit. Woodall alleges that the 2016 Disney film is a copyright infringement of his earlier story, Bucky. Disney and others involved with Moana have denied this, saying that the film is based on Polynesian culture and characters that they created in-house.

Jenny Marchick, the current head of development at DreamWorks Animation, previously testified that she never passed along any Bucky materials to others working on Moana. Woodall had previously claimed to have shared Bucky details with Marchich, which is how he believes Disney learned of his work.

2: Key Ex-OpenAI Researcher Subpoenaed in AI Copyright Case

Next up today, Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch reports that plaintiffs suing OpenAI have subpoenaed Alec Radford, a prominent AI researcher who helped OpenAI develop many of its early models.

Radford joined OpenAI in 2016 but left last year to pursue independent research. He is being subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit filed by authors, including Paul Tremblay and Sarah Silverman, who accuse OpenAI of infringing their copyright-protected works to train various AI systems.

Radford will join Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, two other ex-employees of OpenAI that have been deposed in the case. Amodei and Mann previously left the company to launch Anthropic. They fought the motions but a magistrate judge has already ruled that they must testify about their work for OpenAI.

3: Nintendo Says Latest Legal Win Against Piracy “Significant” for “Entire Games Industry”

Finally, today, Tom Phillips at Eurogamer reports that Nintendo has won a long-running lawsuit against a file-sharing company in France. The ruling could seriously impact how similar companies handle pirated content on their services.

Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Dstorage, the operator of the site 1fichier.com. Nintendo accused the company of enabling widespread piracy and failing to take action after being notified of the infringement. Dstorage, however, argued that it would only remove content with a court order.

However, Dstorage lost at the judicial and appeals court levels. Dstorage appealed again, this time to France’s highest judicial court, which upheld the lower courts’ decisions. Not only is Dstorage liable for significant monetary damages, but a local bank has terminated payment processing for the site. Nintendo claims this is a win for all creators and clarifies that file hosting sites must remove pirated content.

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