court and mr your staff for assisting in the technological challenges to presenting this virtual argument we will be given a lot of practice that we think they're terrific so thank you for thanking them yes  admitted to having acquired a copy of either eerie or creepy on one occasion and seventy eight but what evidence is there that the copy that copy contained a story from the  a good guy mr king character does some really raunchy stuff you know sexual assault with a with a gun you know it just seems to me if that's their essence they're pretty different people well schuster marvel entertainment which published the graphic novels that were based upon the dark tower saga and then the three defendants who were involved in the production and distribution of the actual motion that for better or for worse well the crucial flaw in the plaintiff's analysis is the emphasis upon protect ability in a way that turns it into a red h pairing protect ability of graphic characters is in a way a much simpler analysis and fictional characters graphic characters can be can be protected simply on the basis of paintings in effect what we're dealing with here are characters that are built up as diction will characterize over a period of time and with an accumulation of care of characteristics that in order to be protectable need to be distinctively delineated now we do have a great deal of delineation of roland to shame over the course of thirty two years in which stephen king wrote the seven novels and the novella you you need not to divorce protect ability from the infringement analysis when you look at when you turn to infringement you look at the elements that are were distinctively delineated as the ones that could be infringed to take an example if you had james bond and you look at whether or not he's distinctive y delineated the things that distinctively delineate him are his aston martin his particular weapon his license to kill his debonair good looks the things that that delineate him are the things that are protect the ball you don't consider oh he's protected well and now let's look at similarities to some other detective are some other secret agents be at george to win his his contest with his instructor that he needed to in order to become a gunslinger there were i know in the brief we listed quite a few of th elements were there he is a his tortured self all of those things were were there from the outset and what we what we had here in this case was the problem of presenting to the boulder library manuscript that was typed by denise kelley and we had her deposition and she was able to produce a letter from mr king knowledge in her work it's very clear that that stephen king had created roland before the time came when when the rip was ever published the only thing i would i would footnote is that the name to shane was never given to the character until nine hundred and ninety seven in the th book and then later when he came to revise the initial book in two thousand and three he put the name back into it so just a footnote there in any case the the analysis of character similarity has to look at the distinct the elements of the character that are distinctly developed and here the things that they're pointing to are the most banal elements of the of the characters and even they're there they're playing word games about what things are similar for instance the insistence that roland is a time traveler while when you read the books as i have what roland is doing is he's going between parallel universes that are not synchronized in time he doesn't have a time machine as the rook does where the rock will decide to go back to a particular event in time say the alamo and then just direct the machine there roland does not understand how it works  the travel between these nonsense printed universes is magical he finds this magical door on the beach and goes through it and it suddenly transported into into an nature of nonsense or not of universes is that you can't even talk about what future and one's past they're just entirely different types of characters and the other aspect of this that i wanted to bring out because it's hard  to to sometimes to see this the nature of stephen king's creative process is that the story creates the character he the stories the boss he creates a character and the character does the things and then of in a way the story determines who the character is in in a sense and in fact oddly enough in  volume six of the of the of the books stephen king a fictional stephen king and counters roland ashamed and talks with them about the creative process and talks about how i wanted to make you clint eastwood but after what you did in total i couldn't do it any more you are going to be a fun guy to deal with and so i can create these things out of the events the of the whole notion that that somehow you could use that kind of a creative process to to lift something from this this series of comic books is just preposterous judge pleasanter did an extraordinarily good job of synthesizing a tremendous amount of information and and distilling plaintiff contentions as to the similar elements and that's what his opinion does the the the opinion deals with each of playing just contentions and does a very good job of judiciously setting forth the best parts of plaintiff's argument and and siriano i'm dismissing their significance because they aren't significant there is  really character protection is something that needs to be neither overprotective nor under protective my clients all have an interest in character protection are not saying the characters are not protect the bill what we're saying is this think the bully delineated characters are protected and the things that are protected are the things that make them distinctive not just oh now you're protected and now we look at the totality you know you have to look at the specific element that makes that character who he or she is and that's the that has to be the way that these kind of analyses are perform wanted to mention the elements in this case of our using summaries because i think that that was for me as a copyright lawyer i've never done that before and i think that it was necessary here because no court could be expected to read this four thousand page series of books and so we needed to hire somebody to prepare a reliable summary and the court the court the evidence and read it without without objection from the other side and the report that was prepared by our expert bob gale does an excellent job of really easy to address some of the issues raised by mr cox he is now arguing independent creation which is not the issue is before this court a requires an unbiased review of the facts so it's her by her own statements if our methodology requires an unbiased for you but yet her entire professional career is primarily premised upon her work for stephen king her work on the marvel on the marvel comics but the illustrated graphic novels i guess they're called these days her entire career is p upon student came to feel like you're not i mean to me that sounds like you're saying in no matter what her methodology was she could not be engaged to because she was biased in favor of mr king st it requires an unbiased view so i'm not going to selected the methodology i don't contest that that is the after a methodology but the reality is that she did not i mean she