Tesla and Warner Bros. achieved a partial legal victory when a federal judge in a production film of the science fiction film of the science fiction film Blade Runner 2049 2017 rejected several claims.
The lawsuit accused the two companies to use pictures from the film to advertise Tesla's autonomous cybercab vehicle at an event (1) by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October last year.
The US district judge George Wu stated that he dismissed Alcon's allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. had violated the trademark law according to Reuters (2). In particular, the judge said that Musk had only referred to the original Blade Runner film at the event, and found that Tesla and Alcon were not competitors.
“Tesla and Musk want to sell cars,” quoted Reuters Wu. “The plaintiff is clearly not in this management.”
The WU also released most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the dealer of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue his copyright infringements against Tesla for the alleged use of images with A-generated images that imitated the scenes of Blade Runner in 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that a few hours before the Cybercab event (3) it rejected a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an iconic statue” from the film.
In the lawsuit (4), Alcon explained his decision by saying: “Every prudent brand that is considering a Tesla partnership must massively reinforced, highly politicized, moody and arbitrary behaviors, which sometimes realizes in hate speech.”
Alcon continued that Blade Runner 2049 should not be connected to Musk, Tesla or a Musk company for all of these reasons.
According to Alcon, however, Tesla developed the feeding of Blade Runner's pictures in 2049 in an AI image generator to show a still image that appeared on the screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the picture contained in the background, Musk referred directly to Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk's reference to Blade Runner 2049 was no coincidence because the film contains a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, completely autonomous car”.
