IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—9th Cir.: Irish filmmaker’s change of heart in copyright ownership comes too late, (Feb 26, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

After claiming that his production company owned a film for years, he could not now claim it was his.

A federal district court rightly decided that an Irish filmmaker was legally estopped from arguing that he owned the copyrights to a movie where he had spent years arguing in a California state court that his production company was the rightful owner, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held. The court, in a sparse unpublished opinion affirming a series of district court decisions below that collectively disposed of a 15-year-long dispute, also found that the district court rightly held that the Visual Artists Rights Act did not apply to the creators of moving pictures (Mahon v. Youtube, LLC, No. 24-3570 (9th Cir. Feb. 24, 2026)).

The lawsuit was brought by Mark Mahon, an independent filmmaker based in Cork, Ireland. In 2005, Mahon wrote, directed, and produced the film “Strength and Honor” which follows a single father who rediscovers boxing to save his young son’s life. To develop the film commercially, Mahon created a fully-owned production company, Maron Pictures Ltd., and assigned it all literary and authorship rights in return for € 300,000 and 40% of royalties. Mahon obtained U.S. copyright registrations for both the Film and the screenplay, listing himself as the author and owner of the screenplay copyright but Maron Pictures as the copyright owner of the motion picture copyright.

A complicated and highly disputed sequence of events then followed. Maron Pictures entered into a distribution agreement with Mainsail LLC, an affiliate of the prominent Sam Eigen and Morris Ruskin-run film sales company Shoreline Entertainment. But litigation soon ensued. In January 2010, the film was released in Ireland and with allegedly unauthorized covers and trailers, both of which Mahon believed violated the agreement. Mahon demanded that Mainsail cease and desist from distributing the film and, in 2013, had his company Maron sue Mainsail for breach of contract and accounting in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Three years later, in 2016, the Superior Court sided with Mainsail, finding that much of Mahon’s complaint was time-barred, that Mahon never fully delivered the film to Mainsail, and that Mainsail in any event ceased its distribution activities as soon as it received Mahon’s cease and desist letter.

But that was not the end of it. Beginning in 2018, Mahon came to believe Mainsail continued to distribute the film without his permission. He also found what he believed to be unauthorized copies of the film available for purchase from YouTube, Apple, and Google. He therefore sued all of these companies, plus various affiliates, for copyright infringement, violations of his moral rights, and several other claims. His multiple complaints were eventually consolidated into a single action before the Northern District of California.

District court opinions. The district court eventually disposed of the cases in several different steps. First, in an August 2020 opinion, the court dismissed Mahon’s moral rights claim against Shoreline. Mahon rooted that claim both in the Berne Convention as well as the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, the court noted, but neither had merit. As to the Berne Convention, the court found, the convention protects certain author rights against “distortion, mutilation, or other modification of... [a] work, which shall be prejudicial to [the author’s] honor or reputation.” But the problem for Mahon is that the convention itself was “not self-executing—meaning that Congress must enact laws to implement the convention.” Because Congress did not implement the convention outright, the court noted, it could not be enforced. As to VARA, the court found, while that law did provide “limited” author rights to authors of works of visual art, the court noted, the Act defines “visual art” to mean “a painting, drawing, print, or sculpture” or a “still photographic image,” but not posters or motion pictures. Thus, Mahon had no moral rights claim.

Next, in an October 2020 opinion, the court dismissed Google or Apple’s Irish affiliate because it did not allege infringing activity that took place in the United States. (Claims against YouTube remained in the case for the time being, the court noted, because the record was not yet clear as to whether YouTube distribute the film from servers in the United States).

Finally, in a 2024 decision issued after the completion of discovery, the court granted summary judgment for all remaining defendants. Two central questions remained. The first one was a question that the California Superior Court had never felt it necessary to address when the case was before it: Did Mainsail have the right, under the 2009 licensing agreement it entered into with Maron, to distribute the work in Ireland? The court found that it did. To be sure, the court noted, the terms of the original agreement excluded North America and Ireland. But the parties followed up with a series of emails, the court found, that demonstrated Mainsail’s intention—with Mahon’s agreement—to distribute in Ireland anyway. Mainsail’s initial distribution in Ireland was therefore lawful.

The left one more question. In 2015, while the California litigation was still under way, Mahon purported to cancel his personal license of the film to his production company Maron. But what was the effect of that cancellation? Three different views promptly emerged. In Mahon’s view, any distribution Mainsail made of the film after that point was unauthorized since the chain of rights (Mahon to Maron, and then Maron to Mainsail) had been broken. In Mainsail’s view, however, the Mahon/Maron license didn’t matter because the film had been copyrighted in Maron’s name and not Mahon’s—and thus Mainsail could license the rights directly from Maron. But Mahon had a response to this argument too: The copyright registration in Maron’s name, he argued, was just a “filing error”—ownership of the copyright had always been in Mahon’s hands.

This last argument was a bridge too far for the district court. The problem for Mahon, the court found, was that when Maron sued Mainsail, in state court, Maron represented to that court that it owned the copyright. “Now, after having lost his state court case,” the court observed, “plaintiff attempts to claim that Maron Pictures’ ownership was a mistake and he himself owned the copyright, thus suing in his personal capacity.” Judicial estoppel plainly barred this sudden switch of arguments, the district court found. “[Mahon]’s change-in-course is an explicit attempt to rewrite history and retroactively revoke rights from multiple entities that believed they had such rights,” the court found. “Such action has forced parties into lengthy litigation to which they would not otherwise be subject.” The entire copyright claim would therefor fail.

Decision on appeal. The Ninth Circuit, in an unpublished opinion, had little trouble affirming the district court’s multiple decisions. In fact, the court needed only a few sentences to reach its result. The district court properly granted summary judgment on Mahon’s copyright claims, the court found, because Mahon “failed to create a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether defendants directly infringed on the film’s copyrights within the United States.” The district court also did not abuse its discretion, the court found, in “applying judicial estoppel to bar Mahon’s contention that he, not his company, Maron Pictures, owned the relevant copyrights.” Finally, the court noted, the district court properly dismissed Mahon’s moral rights claim because “federal law does not recognize moral rights protection for motion pictures.”

The Case is No. 24-3570.

Judge: Bress, D.

Attorneys: Mark Mahon, pro se. Graham Marc Buccigross (Mayer Brown LLP) for YouTube LLC.

Companies: YouTube LLC

Cases: Copyright CaliforniaNews