This paper will thoroughly analyze a supreme court case dealing with the entertainment industry more specifically the animation industry. The analysis will include detailed facts from the case through reliable, credible sources. As well as the legal aspects including rights that were violated leading up to the litigation, a detailed court analysis of said issues presented during the case and the final court decision. To conclude this paper, there will be a cross comparative analysis between the court case discussed within this paper and a potential business plan for an individual seeking to enter into this kind of industry.
The court case that is being analyzed in this paper is Gordon v DreamWorks animation SKG. For those who are unaware for this case, Allegedly, Jayme Gordon created the characters that are featured in DreamWorks animated movie “Kung Fu Panda”. These are characters that he registered with the U.S copyright office. Gordon believes that DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures infringed on his copyrighted content thus the reason for litigation. There are many facts that go into the consideration for this case and whether or not DreamWorks actually infringed on Gordon’s work. Some of the main facts include Gordon’s characters, work that was registered and Submission of work to companies.
Jayme Gordon worked throughout the late 80s early 90s creating sketches of characters in development and over the course of 10 years he registered these drawings with the U.S Copyright office (advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu, 2013). The two characters specifically related to this case includes a big panda that goes by the name “Kidd Panda” and a red panda that goes by the name “Redd Panda” these two were apart of “Panda Power (advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu, 2013). As mentioned previously, Gordon took the opportunity to copyright his sketches prior to submitting his work to different companies. These companies included Disney and DreamWorks.
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Gordon filed claims suing DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures for copyright infringement, Contributory copyright infringement and Vicarious copyright infringement (Casetext.com, 2013). What does these infringement claims mean?
The court took into consideration information from both the plaintiff and defendant. Utilizing this information, they were able to analyze the facts in order to conclude the case with a final ruling. Aside from Gordon’s initial infringement claims, the defendants filed two motions. The first being a motion to dismiss on ground of spoliation. Spoliation is the destruction of evidence (civilprocedure.uslegal.com, 2019). In order to determine whether or not to approve or deny this motion, the court needed to find out four important factors (advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu, 2013). These factors included whether or not Gordon actually destroyed evidence, whether or not the evidence could be discovered, whether or not the act was intentional and lastly, the timeframe in which he decided to destroy the evidence, if it was before and he realized that it might aid in a litigation case or after the litigation had already started (advance-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu, 2013). When Gordon was questioned about the situation, he admitted to his old work and continued to say “I make it a practice of shredding the old stuff (advamce-lexis-com.oclc.fullsail.edu, 2013)
After heavy deliberation, the approached a final ruling. The defendants had filed a motion to dismiss on ground of spoliation (casetext.com, 2013). Upon previously mentioned court analysis, the court decided to allow it in part. However, the defendant also filed a motion for summary judgement which got denied (casetext.com, 2013).
