Judge Rejects Disney’s Bid For An Injunction Against Redbox

Disney hit its first road bump in its copyright infringement injunction against Redbox selling Disney movie download codes, which they brought in DVD combo packs like Rogue One or Moana.

This week saw Judge Dean Pregerson reject Disney’s bid for an injunction, as the warning is not clear enough to be deemed a binding contract and that Disney had no right to restrict the consumer’s right to resell the DVD or Blu-ray.

However, the judge did agree with Disney with saying that using a download code was a different copy of the original movie and that it undermined the first sale altogether since the license agreement for the download codes requires a consumer to affirm that he or she is the owner of the physical discs that come with the combo pack.

“This improper leveraging of Disney’s copyright in the digital content to restrict secondary transfers of physical copies directly implicates and conflicts with public policy enshrined in the Copyright Act, and constitutes copyright misuse,” Pregerson said.

The Judge has stated that Disney is unlikely to prevail in this case and Redbox motioned to dismiss the case and will be heard on March 5th.

Redbox issued a statement Wednesday morning:

“The court adopted many of Redbox’s legal arguments and ultimately agreed that Disney could not demonstrate a likelihood of succeeding on the merits of any of its five causes of action.  From Redbox’s perspective, the court’s decision was a commonsense application of the law of contracts to the unenforceable fine print on the outside of Disney’s combo packs. That is, the court found that Disney does not form a contract with Redbox or any other consumer, much less a license, restricting what the consumer can do with product it purchases off the shelf at retail” said Redbox spokesperson Kate Brennan.

What do you think of this result?

Source Variety