Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movieBlade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.

The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Teslas autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event (1) hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.

Recommended Videos U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcons allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters (2). Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.

Related Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars, Reuters quoted Wu as saying. Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business.

Wu also dismissed most of Alcons claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of theBlade Runnerfranchise.

However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes fromBlade Runner 2049without permission.

Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down (3) a request from Tesla and WBD to use an icononic still image from the movie.

In the lawsuit (4), Alcon explained its decision by saying that any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musks massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.

Alcon further said it did not wantBlade Runner 2049to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.

But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images fromBlade Runner 2049into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.

Alcon also said that Musks reference toBlade Runner 2049was not a coincidence as the movie features a strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.

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