Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at a new lawsuit seeking to stop distribution of recent Superhero movies using facial animation technology, including the wildly successful Deadpool and last year's Avengers: Age of Ultron.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp66
Mova is a technology which extends the now well-known concepts of motion capture for actors to more accurately capture the facial expressions and performances of human actors playing CGI characters. The particular way an actor smiles and moves their facial muscles is picked up using phosphorescent makeup dusted on the actor and customized imaging hardware and software. Examples of this are how the CGI characters Ultron and Colossus have more realistic faces that look more like the actors bringing voices to these characters. It has also been used in other movies like Gravity and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
This technology was deemed so revolutionary that Mova won a technical Academy Award last year. It certainly is another improvement for making Superhero and Comic Book movies even more realistic and palatable to audiences who are loving these types of movies right now. But the wide praise and commercial success has unfortunately led to a court dispute over who is the rightful owner of this technology.
The history of Mova's development and ownership has become quite a tortured mess. Steve Perlman is a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and he controlled an online game start-up called OnLive which merged with Mova in 2011. The start-up was struggling in 2012, however, so Perlman left the company to produce another opportunity at a new company called Rearden. When OnLive decided to sell Mova's assets later that year, Perlman tasked one of his Rearden employees with acquiring Mova for his new company.
That's where the plot twist occurs. According to Perlman's story, this employee negotiated instead to improperly sell Mova's assets to a different company called Digital Domain and a Chinese sister company Shenzhenshi in 2013. The Chinese company, which is now on the other side of this court dispute, instead claims that the employee properly sold the rights to Mova to them because Perlman had given up on it after failing himself to make a successful business out of Mova, so he encouraged the employee to salvage what he could from the property on his own. So Perlman claims he was defrauded by an employee, while the Chinese company claims this is nothing more than a severe case of seller's remorse.
It honestly sounds like a script from a Hollywood blockbuster instead of real life.
The decision in this case will come down to a very specific set of facts yet to be proven about what Perlman's previous employee was authorized to do. Ironically, or maybe not so much, that employee now works for Digital Domain, the sister to the Chinese company on the other side of this case. But the larger question for movie nerds is whether Perlman has any chance of succeeding in stopping distribution of movies like Deadpool, Terminator Genisys, and Guardians of the Galaxy based on what he calls an improper use of unlicensed patented technology he claims to own.
That type of order implicates First Amendment issues as well as the usual patent issues, so experts who have publicly opined on this case have largely concluded that there's no way Perlman will be able to obtain such an order for movies already in the marketplace. His lawsuit could affect future projects that Digital Domain and the Chinese company are involved in, but even that may not be true if a damages-based remedy appears to serve the needs of all parties and the public better.
The Bottom Line is, cases like this come up when business people play fast and loose with agency of employees and contracts, so make sure you are always abundantly clear when doing deals or making important decisions in business. Getting caught up in a real-life courtroom drama like these parties is usually much worse than making an ill-advised business deal and living with the consequences of such a deal.
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