Hollywood Reporter: Are some of Hollywood's biggest movies from the past decade — Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Deadpool and Night at the Museum, among others — all copyright infringements because they were allegedly created with stolen technology? The question seems outlandish, and yet, that's exactly what a California federal judge was told on Monday in a case that can't be shrugged off as a crank even if it is now treading on some fantastic territory including a scholar's search for hidden codes in the Hebrew Bible.
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Pandoras box has been opened and the results are not pretty. I have to say that after reading this article, I want to side with the studios. As a creative, yes, I use photoshop to digitally alter my photos to rebalance the light and shadow, color and saturation and it will be a cold day in hell before I let Adobe claim ownership of my work because I used their software. A software or technology creator should not be allowed to claim ownership or copyright infringement on product created with the software or technology. Only if I were to develop the same software or technology using the same code and called it something else should you be allowed to do that. My question is this, why now? This just seems to be a pissing match because it appears, based on this article http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/digital-domain-mova-tech-banned-906902 that the original owner of Rearden and the person who sold the MOVA technology to the Chinese in 2013 are in a spat because Pearlman, the man behind Rearden wasn’t given the same award that went to LaSalle claiming LaSalle had nothing to do with MOVA development. *insert eye roll here*. This is definitely a case to watch.
Whoa. Intellectual property gets complicated fast. I can see both sides of this argument: if the program is doing the work, the person who invented it should get paid for that work, but if the operators are doing most of the work, they really only need to pay for using the program. I think the main problem here is that the program was stolen from the inventor. Can he prove this? Did the Hollywood companies buy the software from the Chinese company who supposedly stole it? If they did buy it, they should be off the hook. Is the consumer put in prison for buying a stolen good if they did not know it was stolen? Shouldn’t the thief pay what he was paid and reparations and get in trouble? The part of this article that gets fishy is that the studios knew that the technology was stolen. Are they then accomplices? What a mess.
Ah copyright cases seem to be a major theme of the greengage this year. With this case yet again we see the lovely murky waters that the legal system can be in regards to copyright law. This case is far more interesting than the cheerleading uniforms and chimpanzee photos rights though. In that it actually has some interesting teeth in regards to the plaintiffs case. That said though I feel that Rearden has to both prove that his intellectual property was if fact stolen, which it seems they are well on the way to doing, and than they need to prove the the production companies knowingly and willfully used products that was stolen. While the former seems like it's going to happen I find it highly likely that Rearden will be unable to prove the latter. As to not owning the CG characters that will never happen because they own the characters themselves so any medium that they appear on the will more likely than not maintain ownership.
This article actually presents a really interesting question about technology and human interfacing. And I think it’s a question that’s going to keep coming up, especially with the advent of technologies like neural networks and artificial intelligence. Who gets to own the output of these technologies? The people who create them or the people who contribute to them? And truthfully, I think the case outlined in this article could do a lot in setting a precedent toward one answer or the other. Not just because it’s directly related to this issue, but because it has such a high profile defense. I mean, Disney, Marvel, Fox, those are HUGE names. So if this argument holds up even with all of the money the companies can throw against them, that’s a lot. I’m also not sure that the rights belong entirely to one party or the other. And I don’t think this court case is exactly set up to establish halfsies, it seems more all or nothing. I’ll be interested to see how this case pans out.
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