Jury Decides for DWA

The lawsuit against a DreamWorks Animation franchise gets overturned::

A Los Angeles jury has sided with DreamWorks Animation in a big lawsuit claiming the idea for the hit Kung Fu Panda movies was stolen from a man who pitched the studio months before it began developing the project without him. ...

The jury took about three days to reach a verdict in favor of the studio. The jurors decided that DWA and its executives did enter into an implied-in-fact contract, but the panel found that the studio didn't use Dunn's ideas, so the question of damages was moot ...

Once in a very long while an outside creator successfully sues a large Hollywood studio for the theft of a story or idea. (Art Buchwald did it against Paramount for Coming to America.) But for the most part, it's a steep mountain that the vast majority of plaintiffs fail to climb to the summit.

This thing will get appealed, and then appealed once more. And three to five years from now we'll discover where it all comes out.

(Probably for the studio. Probably.)