Disney Wins ‘Moana’ Copyright Trial, But $10B Sequel Suit Still Riding The Legal Waves, For Now

deadline.com:

Buck Woodall’s five-year battle with Disney over who really created Moana looks to have come to an end, with a Los Angeles jury on Monday finding for the House of Mouse in the animated franchise dispute, at least for now.

While the panel of six women and two men determined in just under three hours that Disney and primary Moana creators John Musker and Ron Clements never saw or even knew about Woodall’s Bucky the Surfer Boy work while working on the 2016 animated hit, Woodall now has a separate copyright infringement action in the courts over blockbuster sequel Moana 2.

Right now, after a slew of internal communications and more sausage-making was revealed in documents for this trial, Disney is taking the win and leaving it at that. “We are incredibly proud of the collective work that went into the making of Moana and are pleased that the jury found it had nothing to do with Plaintiff’s works,” a spokesperson for the Bob Iger-run media giant told Deadline after the verdict was read out this afternoon in Judge Alka Sagar’s courtroom at the Roybal Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Los Angeles.

Lawyers for Woodall were not so upbeat, obviously. “We are obviously disappointed in the verdict,” attorney Gustavo D. Lage said Monday. “At the present time, we are weighing our options to determine the best path forward regarding the legal remedies available to our client.” With the question of whether Musker or Clements or any other principal had ever come in contact with Woodall’s Bucky materials the primary question before the jury, any issue of similarity between the Hawaii setting and Polynesian demigods in Bucky and Moana was moot. “They had no idea about Bucky,” Disney outside counsel Moez Kaba said of the