Disney sued over ‘Avengers’ facial capture tech
The Walt Disney Company has been accused of infringing patents for facial capture technology in several “Avengers” and “Star Wars” movies.
A complaint submitted to the US District Court for the Northern District of California claimed that the media giant had lied about the technology it had used to create the character and in turn infringed four patents related to Rearden’s facial capture technology.
Rearden’s complaint claims that the San Francisco court’s prior ruling in Shenzhenshi Haitiecheng Science and Technology Co v Rearden LLC et al (2019), determined that it owns all assets related to facial capture technology, not Disney’s special effects contractor Digital Domain 3.0 (DD3).
The case centred around the ownership of the facial capture system and resulted in a preliminary injunction against DD3’s parent company from continuing to use “stolen” technology.
Rearden now claims that Disney had “lied” about the technology it had used to create “Avengers” villain Thanos, as well as numerous others across the “Avengers” and “Star Wars” franchises, and had instead relied on patented technology owned by Rearden.
Disney says that it had used its in-house MEDUSA system to create Thanos, but Rearden claims that documents indicate that “all or part of the work” used to animate the character was performed using its own MOVA Contour Facial Capture System.
As well as using the “Avengers Endgame” and “Infinity War”, Rearden claims that “almost every recent Marvel and Star Wars movie” was made using its patented technology.
The complaint said: “Where defendants used the stolen MOVA Contour technology to create movies, they have infringed plaintiffs’ copyright in the MOVA Contour software.
“Regardless of whether defendants used the stolen MOVA Contour technology or their own MEDUSA capture technology to create the many films that are streamed on Disney+, they are infringing the Rearden patents.”
Rearden also alleges that Disney infringed on its copyrighted “Contour” software used in conjunction with the facial capture tech.
Rearden has asked the court to rule that Disney infringes its four patents and its copyright for the Contour software, as well as a permanent injunction barring the media empire from further infringement.
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