Disney Owes $240M for Stealing Ideas

O R L A N D O, Fla., Aug. 11 -- The Walt Disney Company stole ideas for asports complex from two businessmen and should pay $240 million indamages, a six-member jury ruled today.

Nicholas Stracick, Edward Russell and their company, All ProSports Camps, accused Disney of fraud, theft of trade secrets,breaking an implied contract and breaching a confidentialrelationship. (Disney is the parent company of ABCNEWS.com.)

Disney executives denied using anybody else’s ideas for the WideWorld of Sports complex, the spring training home of the AtlantaBraves, at Walt Disney World.

“Disney is an honorable company,” Louis Meisinger, thecompany’s general counsel, said Wednesday outside court. “We don’t steal other people’s ideas.”

Defining the ScopeThe judge severely limited the scope of what jurors couldconsider by adopting jury instructions that said the architecture,site plan and business plan for the sports complex were not copiedfrom All Pro and could not be considered.

All Pro claimed 88 similarities between its plans and the Disneycomplex and documented more than 200 telephone calls with Disneyexecutives.

Stracick, a retired baseball umpire from Buffalo, N.Y., andRussell, an architect from Fonthill, Ontario, testified theypitched their idea for a sports complex to Disney officials in thelate 1980s.

Four years after Disney officials rejected their plans in 1989,the company announced it would build a $100 million complex. Itopened in 1997.

One alternate juror, dismissed from the case beforedeliberations began because he wasn’t needed on the jury, said hewould have decided against Disney and awarded the full request of$1.4 billion in damages to teach the entertainment giant a lesson.

Jimmy Johnson Jr., a 35-year-old truck driver, questioned thetestimony of Disney executives, particularly architect Wing Chao,who claimed they knew nothing of Stracick and Russell’s plans.Johnson said Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner appearedevasive in his videotaped deposition played in the five-week trial.