On June 6, 2011, United States District Court for the Central District of California denied The Walt Disney Company's request that its film Cars 2 not be reviewed for discovery for the purposes of commercial secrecy and threat of piracy, and ordered the defendants to immediately produce the screenplay/script and an audio-visual copy of Cars 2.

It also ruled that the plaintiff showed a justified need for the film and actual harm if he did not receive a copy of it, because he would not be able to bring a preliminary injunction motion without it.

The basis of its claim was that basic plot ideas of anthropomorphic cars involving humor and romance with a backdrop of a race were not protected.

held that The Walt Disney Company showed that the protectable elements of the film such as plot, sequence of events, pace characters, theme, mood and setting were not substantially similar to Mandeville-Anthony's works as a matter of law.

[5] The court also held that Disney showed sufficient evidence that the statute of limitations had expired, as Mandeville-Anthony filed his complaint five years after Cars was released.

Lastly, it stated that district court properly granted judgment on Jake Mandeville-Anthony's state law claim for breach of implied contract because it was barred by the applicable two-year statute of limitations, and neither delayed discovery nor a continuing violations theory applied to extend the limitations period.