SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in California has turned back arguments by a computer graphics company that it owns copyrights in films made using its technology.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of the Northern District of California on Wednesday dismissed without prejudice software company Rearden's copyright claims against major picture studios, including The Walt Disney Co., Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount.

The case centers on Rearden's “MOVA Contour” graphics technology, which generates three-dimensional images based on human facial movements. Last year, the company secured a ruling that it owns the intellectual property underpinning that technology in separate litigation with a competitor.

Now, Rearden is suing the movie studios that contracted with that competitor, alleging it owns copyrights in hits such as the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” and “Deadpool” because the film studios used the technology to create special effects.

But Tigar rebuffed that argument. He ruled that recent case law from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and an earlier ruling by a New York district court in a case called Torah Soft v. Drosnin, suggest the software must be shown to do the “lion's share” of the work in order for its maker to have a viable copyright claim in the output.

“The court does not find it plausible that the MOVA Contour output is created by the program without any substantial contribution from the actors or directors,” Tigar wrote.

“Unquestionably, the MOVA program does a significant amount of work to transform the two dimensional information captured on camera into three dimensional captured surface and tracking mesh outputs,” the judge added. “But this cannot be enough, since all computer programs take inputs and turn them into outputs.”

Steve Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, who represents Rearden, said in an email he was “generally pleased” with the ruling. He added that the plaintiff intends to file a “different type of copyright claim that will avoid the Torah Soft lion's share of the output test that Judge Tigar had a problem with.”

Kelly Klaus of Munger Tolles & Olson, which represented the movie studios jointly in the motion to dismiss, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Thursday.

“This decision maintains the status quo and everyone's common-sense understanding of how software works,” said Ethan Jacobs, an intellectual property lawyer at Holland Law who is not involved in the case. At the same time, Jacobs said he expects more such arguments to be advanced by software companies in the future, as software becomes increasingly sophisticated and computing power increases.

Rearden is also pursuing patent infringement claims. Tigar dismissed with leave to amend the company's direct infringement claims against the movie studios, saying it would “stretch the boundaries of the patent law past their breaking point” to equate the studios' contracting with Rearden's competitor to “use” of a patented system.

At the same time, he denied the studios' motion to dismiss claims that they induced the competitor, called Digital Domain 3.0 Inc., to infringe the related patents. “It is not unreasonable to infer that by contracting with DD3 to use the MOVA Contour facial motion capture system, Disney intended and acted to induce infringement,” the judge wrote.