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Passing off or Inspiration?

PASSING OFF is the act of passing off someone else's work as your own. Sometimes the instance occurs when two pieces of work are very similar and there becomes a grey area where the difference between the work becomes blurred. Which came first and whether one has influenced the other. Where does the law lie in these situations?

In 2005, a group of students from the French academy ESRA (Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle) started production on a Computer Animated short called Above then Beyond, which they then completed a year later. Then in 2009, Pixar released their 10th Computer Animated feature film called  Up. It was not until a year later that people have begun to notice similarities between the two. Was Pixar inspired by this French short film, or is it all just a coincidence?
Click on the link to see the film in question:
http://dai.ly/dzVCRK

Comparitive stills of both films

 The similarities are obvious, but had Pixar stolen the idea and passed it off as their own? Researchers from the website youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com, contacted one of the students involved, Yannick Banchereau, and asked if Pixar bought the rights to their concept or if it was purely a coincidence. This is what he said:

“Well, no, none of us went to work at Pixar, if you know someone who is in Supinfgraph, you should know that ESRA has a partnership with Pixar, so we concluded that for Pixar to see our film among those that ESRA had sent them, and they “kept” (stolen?) the idea into a feature film … Unfortunately the film does not belong to us because this was done as part of our studies, so we can do nothing … Thank you for your interest, it’s good to see that someone has acknowledged our film (even if the quality is far from the Pixar)”

Pixar have shown evidence of concept art that is dated as far back as 2004, but it is still unclear as to whether Pixar had seen the student's film during the development process of Up, or whether it is merely an amazing coincidence.

However as the film was created as part of the student's studies, they do not own the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to it. These would instead belong to ESRA. This is often the case within colleges and universities. Each institution has a different policy, but on the whole, whatever you create automatically becomes their property on submission.

NB: In certain situations the institution can pass the IPR back to the student to allow the student to use the work as required.