Warner Bros. with respect to The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and the permanent injunction for this category of products.[1]
The third category comprises AVELA products that each extend an image extracted from an item of publicity material into three dimensions (such as statuettes inside water globes, figurines, action figures, and busts). Many of these products also include a juxtaposition of multiple extracts from the public domain materials, and such composite works infringe for the reasons explained in the preceding paragraph. Even where the product extends a single two-dimensional public domain image into three dimensions, a three-dimensional rendering must add new visual details regarding depth to the underlying two-dimensional image. (As a simple illustration, it is impossible to determine the length of someone’s nose from a picture if they are looking directly at the camera.) Of course, even more visual details must be added if the two-dimensional image is transformed into a fully realized figure, as most three-dimensional AVELA products are. (Otherwise, for example, the back of each figurine character would be blank.) Much of this visual information is available in the feature-length films, where the characters are observable from a multitude of viewing angles.
In depositions, the AVELA licensees who developed the action figures, figurines, water globes, and busts made no pretense that they were not guided by their knowledge of the films. Instead, they indicated that, while each three-dimensional design began with an image from the public domain photo stills and movie posters, the goal was to create a product recognizable as the film character. The only reasonable inference is that the details added to establish perspective and full realization were chosen to be consistent with the film characters. As a result, the addition of visual details to each two-dimensional public domain image to create the
- ↑ AVELA does not dispute that a permanent injunction is appropriate to the extent that the AVELA products are found to infringe Warner Bros.’s copyrights.
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