Here is a recent case about how difficult it is to prove that a third party used one’s ideas without permission and also about how important it is for an author to keep a paper trail of his creative process.

The case is Gerald Morawski v. Lightstorm Entertainment Inc. et al., US Central District of California, (case No. 2:11-cv-10294).

Gerald Morawski is a visual effect consultant who first met film director James Cameron in 1991 as Mr. Cameron was interested in some of Mr. Morawski’s works. Mr. Morawski signed later on a Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement with Lightstorm Entertainment, a production company headed by Mr. Cameron. Under its terms, Mr. Morawski’s ideas and his responses to Lightstorm would be Lightstorm’s exclusive property. However, Mr. Morawski’s original ideas and artworks created by him which were not derived from Lightstorm’s material would remain his exclusive property.

Later on, Mr. Morawski pitched to Lightstorm an idea for a film, Guardians of Eden, but the project did not go through. After Mr. Cameron wrote and directed the very popular Avatar movie, Mr. Morawski filed suit against Lightstorm and James Cameron, arguing that they had used his original ideas in Avatar, identifiying 19 similarities in the Guardians of Eden story and in Avatar, and claiming that therefore the defendants had breached the Agreement.

However, Mr. Morawski was unsuccessful in proving his claim, and on January 31, 2013, Judge Margaret Morrow from the Central District Court of California granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants.

Ideas are not Protected by Copyright

Ideas are not protectable by copyright. § 102(b) of the 1976 Copyright Act states that “[i]n no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea… regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.“

The Doctrine of Independent Creation

However, ideas may be protected by contract, either express or implied, and that it is what Mr. Morawski was arguing in this case, albeit unsuccessfully. In order to be successful in his claim, Mr. Morawski had to prove that defendants had used his intellectual property without permission.

The fact that plaintiff’s ideas and defendant’s work were similar created an inference that the defendant had used plaintiff’s ideas, as the defendant had indeed “received” plaintiff’s ideas. However, under the doctrine of independent creation, this inference could be dispelled if the defendant could prove independent creation.

In this case, while there was indeed similarities between Mr. Morwaski’s ideas and Avatar, Mr. Cameron successfully proved that he independently created the successful movie. The Court reviewed some of the defendant’s prior works, including projects, unproduced works, and drafts, where some of the themes, characters and plots later developed in Avatar appeared, before Mr. Cameron had access to Mr. Morawski’s ideas.

Also, defendants pointed out that several of the ideas and themes in Avatar stemmed from history or commonly used themes. For instance, the romance between the main character Jake Sully, a human being, and Neytiri, a creature indigenous to the planet Pandora where the action takes place, was a variation of a Romeo and Juliette type love story between a colonizer and a native such as, for example, the story of Pocahontas. The Court cited a 1984 California case, Klekas v. EMI Films, where the court noted that “there are a limited number of ideas and themes available for use in literary material, and, therefore, those ideas and themes are shared by all literature.”

Even if the works were similar, and defendant had access to plaintiff’s work before actually creating Avatar, no inference of copying could be drawn as Mr. Cameron owned prior works containing the same elements.

Indeed, ideas are rarely entirely original and novel. Also, even original ideas may have stemmed independently from two different creative minds. Some of the take-aways from this case is that it is a good idea  for artists to have a paper trail of their creation process, and to archive all of these documents.