Moana’s Legal Odyssey: Five-Year Copyright Dispute Ends With Disney Sailing Free

The lawsuit was first filed in spring 2020 by animator Buck G. Woodall. According to Woodall, Disney’s blockbuster hit Moana infringed his copyright in Bucky the Surfer Boy, an unproduced animated film project that Woodall allegedly invested half-a-million dollars into and worked on for well over a decade. Woodall’s core complaints rested on allegations of broad thematic similarities between the two works, such as a teenager on a dangerous journey to save a Polynesian island. However, the more granular details of the plot, dialogue, characters, and other protectable elements all largely diverged.

Despite the substantive infringement claim being on arguably shaky ground, the case went to trial in part because the lower court failed to substantively compare the works and decide the substantial similarity issue at the motion to dismiss and summary judgement stages.

First, in 2021, the court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, stating that fact and expert discovery were required and would aid the court in its analysis of the substantial similarity issue. For support, Judge Consuelo Marshall expressly referenced Alfred v. Walt Disney Company, the 2020 unpublished memorandum opinion in which the Ninth Circuit reversed her prior decision to dismiss a somewhat similar copyright infringement claim due to a lack of substantial similarity.[1]

But to the surprise of some, even after fact and expert discovery were concluded, the court’s 2024 summary judgment opinion still declined to engage in a granular comparison and assessment of the works for substantial similarity. Instead, in addition to finding open questions of fact on the issue of access, the court found that dueling expert reports also created factual issues for substantial similarity to be resolved by a jury.[2] The court’s reluctance to engage in a pre-trial comparison of the works was likely due to a lack of guidance from the Ninth Circuit on when and how lower courts can compare and dismiss copyright infringement claims involving motion pictures and/or literary works due to a lack of substantial similarity without a trial.

The defendants did obtain a technical victory at summary judgment that significantly limited Disney’s financial exposure in the case. Judge Marshall found as a matter of law that the applicable three-year statute of limitations barred Woodall’s claims against all the defendants, except for Disney’s DVD distribution company, Buena Vista Home Entertainment. According to the court, the undisputed facts showed that Woodall suspected infringement as early as December 2016. But Woodall did not file the lawsuit until April 2020, which was outside of the three-year limitations period for the asserted claims. As a result, only the lower value claims against Buena Vista for distributing Moana DVDs after April 24, 2017, proceeded to trial.

Given the short deliberations, the jury appears to have easily found in Buena Vista’s favor. As the jury verdict form shows, the jury found that the plaintiff failed to establish the threshold question of access. As a result, the hotly contested question of substantial similarity did not even get decided on the merits, despite five years of litigation and extensive fact and expert discovery in connection with that issue. The jury’s decision also likely paves the way for a similar fate for Woodall’s separate copyright infringement complaint against the recently released Moana 2, unless the jury’s verdict gets overturned in post-trial motion practice or an appeal.

Takeaways

• While providing some certainty to the litigants, this jury verdict is unfortunately likely to do little to resolve the uncertainty around litigating entertainment industry copyright infringement claims in the Ninth Circuit, where most of them get heard.
• Substantial similarity issues will likely continue to get inconsistent treatment in the Ninth Circuit, waded into by some judges at the pre-trial stage and deferred by others on the basis of a need for fact and/or expert testimony or a jury’s assessment of open questions of fact.
• Litigants will need to determine pre-trial motion practice strategy on an ad hoc basis, with decisions depending on factors such as: the case facts; whether or not the plaintiff is pro se; the readable proclivities (if any) of the assigned judge on whether and when it is permissible for courts to adjudicate the question of substantial similarity before a trial; and whether the district court judge, like Judge Marshall here, was recently reversed on a pre-trial finding of a lack of substantial similarity.
• Defendants looking for ways to minimize the costs of litigation or shorten the time period to adjudication of the merits may consider options such as: 1) seeking to bifurcate the question of access from substantial similarity in cases where the facts supporting access are weak or poorly pled[3]; 2) seeking to bifurcate and expedite fact and expert discovery into the extrinsic test only in a first stage that ends with an early summary judgment motion on that limited issue, and only addressing the remaining liability and damages issues in a second stage if the first stage summary judgment motion is not successful[4]; 3) asking the court to expedite limited discovery and review of a single dispositive issue, such as the statute of limitations, ownership, access, or substantial similarity, and to stay all other discovery and motion practice until that early summary judgment motion is decided.[5]