Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Kung Fu Judgment

Another Hollywood plagiarim lawsuit goes down in flames.

A California appeals court upheld a verdict in favor of DreamWorks Animation after a jury found that the studio didn't steal the idea to create its mega-successful Kung Fu Panda movies.

Terence Dunn, a self-described “writer-producer-teacher-philospher” who was CEO of a company called Zen-Bear Inc., sued in June 2010 for breach of an implied contract. At a trial in the summer of 2011, he told a jury that he made a four-to-five minute pitch to a Dreamworks executive in November 2001, and followed it up with a phone call over his "proposal for Zen-Bear, the Kung Fu Panda." ...

Only once in a long while do individuals with a hot idea succssfully sue a film studio or entertainment conglomerate over an (allegedly) stolen property. Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount over Coming to America a bajillion years ago, but Art was one of a chosen few who managed to push all the way to victory.

Usually if a studio thinks it's going to lose, that studio strikes a last-minute settlement. That didn't happen in this case.

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