By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
A jury has awarded Moonbug Entertainment $23.5 million after its successful lawsuit against competitor BabyBus Co.
A jury earlier sided with Moonbug’s claim that BabyBus infringed its copyright for its hit show CoComelon with a competing show called Super Jojo. After three days of deliberation, the jury came back with an award of $17.5 million in damages, and $5.8 million in statutory damages.
“We are incredibly pleased with this outcome. It has been fabulous working with such a great client that fully trusted our small and mighty team going up against Quinn Emanuel,” said Moonbug’s lawyer Ryan Tyz. “I am so proud of the entire Tyz Law Group team, especially Ciara McHale and Deborah Hedley, along with Moonbug’s Victoria Baxter, who led the trial with me with and helped tell the CoComelon story, which is as inspiring as the shows they create.”
The trial in this case began on July 5 and ran for more than three weeks as the culmination of a legal battle that started two years ago, when Moonbug filed its first complaint against BabyBus. They claimed the company’s show Super Jojo infringed on several of its copyrights, and YouTube subsequently deleted the Super Jojo channel. At the time, Super Jojo had roughly 22 million subscribers and was one of the top 25 animation channels on the entire YouTube platform.
Last year Moonbug amended its claim, saying Super Jojo was “blatantly copying CoComelon,” including its characters, settings, song titles and lyrics and images. During the trial, Moonbug submitted hundreds of videos containing replicated video characters, settings, song titles, lyrics, and images to back its claims. In total, Moonbug accused Babybus of copying 42 characters, plot devices, and characters from Cocomelon videos.
In its defence, BabyBus did not deny the similarities between the two shows, but instead argued that the similarities are inherent to that type of show. The jury did not agree, and came back with a decision that backed agreed 39 of Moonbug’s claims.
“This verdict should serve as a warning that Moonbug will not stand by and allow infringers to free ride off our success, including by making a carbon copy of our beloved JJ character, which is so loved by children across the globe,” said lawyer Rob Miller.
The case is considered significant for the licensing industry because the jury agreed that CoComelon’s characters were eligible for full copyright protection, not just what is known as ‘thin’ protection, which would only protect the rights holder from near identical copying. Thanks to this case, CoComelon characters like main protagonist JJ would be deemed fully protected and similar or ‘derivative’ characters may violate those protections.