The District Court for the Northern District of California recently granted Disney’s motion for partial reconsideration of the court’s denial of summary judgment for the defendants as to three films: Beauty and the Beast, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Deadpool. Dismissed in part since then, the case’s remaining intellectual property infringement claims now appear closer to fading to black. Several years ago in 2017, Rearden LLC, inventor of the MOVA Contour Reality Capture Program (“MOVA”) software for capturing facial expressions filed suit alleging copyright and trademark infringement by the Walt Disney Company and Twentieth Century Fox arising out of several summer tentpoles. Motion capture tech inventor’s intellectual property claims alleging infringement by Disney moving closer to termination? While perhaps mildly sympathetic to the “orphan works” problem in copyright law, the court concluded that the jury could easily have found knowledge that unauthorized duplication of even not widely available movies was illegal. The defendant, Douglas Gordon, testified to believing that selling DVDs of movies copied from old VHS tapes was not infringement because nobody appeared to own the rights and argued that the evidence was insufficient to find willfullness. The Copyright Act prohibits any person from “infring a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain. ![]() Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the criminal conviction of “a film buff since childhood” on two counts of criminal copyright infringement. Orphan works, fair use, and criminal copyright infringement: First Circuit upholds conviction for copying movies from old VHS tapes. Another might be copyright in a screenplay or the literary fiction, short story, or comic on which it is based. One link might be rights of publicity that belong to the subject of a life story. The “chain” is a series of documents that link current ownership of those rights to their original owners. That’s because chain of title in the film industry refers to the ownership of intellectual property rights, life rights, and other rights involved in a cinematic project. But unlike the title in your film’s chain of title, it’s unlikely to stop your project from ever being seen. This kind of title is critically important, of course. 25 Beretta, in a continuous opening shot of “ The Player” heading across a studio lot, or in disturbing typography like Se7en, you’re thinking of the wrong titles. Where is the title to a film or television project? If your first thought was something like in an animated opening sequence starting off with James Bond turning abruptly to camera with raised. ![]() Three reasons your independent film or television project needs a clean chain of title.
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