A jury award of $600k against Disney for vicariously infringing the copyright of computer graphics software used in its live action version of Beauty and the Beast has been overturned by a district court in Northern California.

Disney had been found liable for vicarious copyright infringement in December over a contractor’s use of software developed by the plaintiff, Rearden, to animate the ‘Beast’ character in the Disney film, which was released in 2017.

However, district judge Jon S Tigar reversed the award on 26 August by granting Disney’s motion for judgment as a matter of law. 

He said Rearden, which was founded by former Apple scientist Steve Perlman, had failed to prove the entertainment giant was liable for the infringement, given that it was a vendor, Digital Domain 3 (DD3), that had undertaken the work using Rearden’s MOVA Contour Reality Capture (MOVA) program.

The judge said Rearden had “failed to introduce legally sufficient evidence at trial that Disney had the practical ability to identify, and therefore supervise or control, whether its vendors such as DD3 were infringing copyright through the use of proprietary software and/or hardware”.

This, he said, meant “Disney cannot be liable for vicarious copyright infringement as a matter of law”.

MOVA Contour Reality Capture (MOVA) is a program for capturing the human face to create computer graphics characters in motion pictures.

In December, the jury had found that Rearden owned the copyright in the MOVA Contour software program during the time DD3 used it in connection with its work on the Beast character making Disney vicariously liable for DD3’s infringement of the copyright.

The intellectual property lawsuit against Disney was originally filed by Reardon in 2017.

The software has been used in the production of various films, including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.