Opinion ID: 77567
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Summary Judgment and Other Motions Activity

Text: 23 WorldCo filed a Daubert 2 motion to exclude portions of Corwin's experts' reports, then filed a motion for summary judgment. In response to the motion for summary judgment, Corwin submitted, among other things, new affidavits from his four experts. Corwin claims that these affidavits merely redacted the portions of the original reports no longer applicable after dismissal of the trade secret claims. WorldCo filed a motion to strike certain of Corwin's evidence filed in opposition to the motion for summary judgment—particularly the new affidavits and certain of the testimony concerning Disney's access to the Painting. 24 On 12 November 2004, the district court granted the Daubert motion to strike portions of Corwin's four initial expert reports on the grounds that (1) those portions utilized improper methodology, impermissibly comparing ideas in the Painting and EPCOT rendering and failing to compare expressive or protectable elements; and (2) the reports contained lists of similarities that are inherently subjective and unreliable. 3 The court granted the motion to strike the new affidavits on the ground that they were untimely filed. It also refused to admit the testimony of either Marian Jaffray or Patricia Jaffray Jones regarding Jaffray's alleged meeting with Disney or what he might have taken to such a meeting on the grounds that it was not based on personal knowledge and, thus, constituted inadmissible hearsay. The court also specifically found that Jones's report of her father's exclamation upon receiving notice of EPCOT was not protected by the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule because Corwin (1) cited no case law to support his proposition that reading a letter and newspaper article constitutes a startling occasion for the purposes of this exception and (2) failed to produce any admissible evidence demonstrating that Jaffray had first hand knowledge that the Miniature Worlds painting was left with [Disney]. R20-229 at 35. 25 In the same order, the court granted the motion for summary judgment in favor of WorldCo. The court first found that Waters's copyright interest in the Painting was valid, giving Corwin standing to sue, and that Corwin had at least raised a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Waters's selection as to how the castles and villages were arranged in the painting, the colors associated with the elements, and the overall structure and arrangement of the underlying ideas was original enough to be afforded protection against infringement. Id. at 31-33. 26 The court then reasoned, however, that because it found Corwin had failed to produce any admissible evidence demonstrating access or even an inference of access, 4 Corwin would have to show striking similarity in order to prevail on his infringement claims. The court found, in comparing the Miniature Worlds Painting with the 1981 Hall/Scifo rendering of EPCOT [a]t the level of protectable expression, that there was no genuine issue of material fact as to whether the two works are strikingly similar. 5 Id. at 38. The court also observed that even if there had been such a genuine issue of material fact, overwhelming, uncontroverted evidence that [WorldCo] independently created the EPCOT rendering supports summary judgment in favor of WorldCo. Id. at 40-41.