According to Deadline, a man named Jamye Gordon has been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $3 million for trying to defraud DreamWorks with a phony copyright infringement scheme. This all goes back to 2008, when Gordon saw a trailer for Kung Fu Panda and decided to alter a story he had previously written called Panda Power so it would seem more like the movie. He also revised some drawings and renamed his work Kung Fu Panda Power, and after suing DreamWorks for copyright infringement, he proposed that he’d be willing to settle if the studio would give him $12 million. DreamWorks wisely declined, the case went to court, and Gordon was convicted of fraud and perjury back in November.
In addition to altering his work to seem more like Kung Fu Panda, Gordon also purposefully deleted relevant evidence from his computer, lied during his deposition, and created fake backdated sketches to further support his made-up claims. Deadline says “the full nature of Gordon’s scheme came to light” when DreamWorks found out that some of his panda drawings were traced from a Lion King coloring book, which will probably make for a very exciting scene if this ever becomes a movie for some reason.
Here’s a trailer for Kung Fu Panda, but remember that you’ll get in trouble if you decide to start telling everyone that DreamWorks stole it from you: