Brad Pitt's Face Touted in Disney Ruling on Animation Copyright

(Bloomberg) -- Brad Pitt got an honorable mention in a federal judge’s dismissal of claims by the inventor of a 3-D animation program that Walt Disney Co. and its Marvel Studios stole his technology for multiple blockbuster films.

At issue was whether the special effects or the actors ultimately were responsible for the “lion’s share of the creativity” when two-dimensional images of faces were transformed into 3-D in hits such as Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Marvel’s “Guardian’s of the Galaxy.”

While the creator of the MOVA Contour Reality Capture Program claimed that the role of the actors was marginal next to his technology, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco didn’t buy it.

Tigar pointed out that MOVA’s own court papers were littered with references to actors’ contributions in various films, including a “3-D database of everything Brad Pitt’s face is capable of doing” that was used to turn the then-44-year-old heartthrob into an 87-year-old man in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” That movie, released in 2008, was co-produced by the Kennedy/Marshall Co., Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros, according to Imdb.com.

“Unquestionably, the MOVA program does a significant amount of work to transform the two dimensional information captured on camera into three-dimensional Captured Surface and Tracking Mesh outputs,” the judge wrote in Wednesday’s ruling. “But this cannot be enough, since all computer programs take inputs and turn them into outputs.”

The inventor of MOVA, Rearden LLC, led by entrepreneur Steve Perlman, alleged that Disney and Marvel knew that it owned the intellectual property for the technology and that the company supplying visual effects for the studios had stolen the tech from a secured storage facility.

The judge is allowing MOVA to revise and refile its copyright infringement claims. He dismissed some trademark claims and ruled that it’s “premature” to toss others.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Blumberg in San Francisco at pblumberg1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Rob Golum

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