Patenting for Inventors Ep.162: Zootopia 2: The Shocking Fraudulent Patent That Drives the Entire Plot!

Spoiler warning: This episode discusses key plot points from Zootopia 2.

In this episode of Patenting for Inventors, Adam Diament explores the most unexpected legal storyline in a major animated film: a city-wide conspiracy driven by a fraudulent patent.

Adam breaks down the movie’s central mystery—an invention stolen from its real creator, inventorship erased, and a forged patent used to rewrite history—and explains why the plot is fun, dramatic…and completely incompatible with how patents actually work.

Along the way, Adam covers:

• why patents expire (and what “public domain” really means)

• why inventorship is tied to conception—and can’t be bought, inherited, or faked

• why modern patent filings involve deep digital records, timestamps, and declarations

• why patents are public, searchable documents—not secret relics

• why journals and notebooks don’t control patent rights in a first-inventor-to-file system

• practical inventor takeaways: file early, protect your work, and don’t rely on “origin stories”

It’s part movie commentary, part patent-law crash course—and a reminder that even when a story gets the law wrong, it can still spotlight something real: innovation matters, and credit matters.

Patenting for Inventors Ep. 162:

Podcast Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the Patenting for Inventors podcast. I’m your host, Adam Diament, patent attorney and partner at the law firm of Nolan Heimann in Los Angeles, California. This episode is “Zootopia 2: The Shocking Fraudulent Patent That Drives the Entire Plot!”

I want to talk to you about something that I promise you did not see coming when you walked into a Disney movie featuring talking animals wearing tiny shirts: a patent dispute. Yes, Zootopia 2, a film marketed with foxes and bunnies, somehow wandered straight into the world of intellectual property law. And as a patent attorney, let me just say: finally. My moment. Years of law school, hundreds of filings, countless interviews with examiners, all of it has led to the day when I get to explain to the world what Disney gets wrong about patents.

And yes, I am absolutely going to be that guy who explains the legal flaws in a children’s movie. Don’t worry, this is still, without question, the greatest animated film in history where the key to the plot is a patent dispute. It might also be the only one, but I’m still proudly crowning this the GOAT of animated patent films, a competitive category of exactly one.”

A quick warning: spoilers ahead, so if you don’t want the plot revealed, come back after you’ve seen the movie.

Now, I know many of you listening are casual adults or inventors, maybe just enjoying a podcast while you’re driving, cooking, or avoiding dealing with laundry, so don’t worry: this is a friendly tour through patent land. No legal jargon. No terrifying statutory citations. This is just me, the movie, and a reptile who absolutely got robbed of inventorship credit.

So let’s set the stage.

In Zootopia 2, the city’s famous weather walls were actually invented by a pit viper named Agnes De’Snake, who brings her plans to businessman Ebenezer Lynxley. Ebenezer takes one look and thinks, “Perfect. I’ll just steal this.”

He swipes her journal, rips out the real patent, and replaces it with a forged one claiming he invented everything. His tortoise maid catches him, so — in the most aggressively un-Disney move possible, he injects her with pit viper venom and frames Agnes for the murder.

Reptiles get exiled, Ebenezer becomes the city’s “visionary engineer,” and the Lynxley family spends generations coasting on a stolen patent and a body count.

Years later, the detectives (plus Agnes’s great-grandson) uncover the real journal, the ripped-out patent, and the whole cover-up, and bring the truth out.

That’s the plot. And as a patent attorney, I enjoyed every moment of this legally impossible fever dream.

Because here’s the thing: this is by far the most dramatic thing anyone has ever ascribed to a patent. I’ve dealt with inventors who get very passionate about their ideas, especially when someone challenges who thought of something first, but never once have I thought, “Ah yes, this dispute could single-handedly reshape a city, warp its politics, and rewrite its entire social structure for a century.”

Usually the stakes are more like, “Who really invented a foldable water bottle that also doubles as a Bluetooth speaker?”

But the movie tells us this forged patent becomes the foundation of the entire city. Which is adorable, because real patents last 20 years. After that? Public domain. Anyone can use the invention. So the idea that the Lynxley family built a multi-generational empire off a single patent is like saying your great-grandfather made a fortune selling fidget spinners in 2017 and your family is still coasting on it today.

Of course, the bigger issue is inventorship. In real patent law, you can’t just take someone else’s idea, slap your name on it, and shout “finders keepers!” Inventorship is tied to actual conception. If Agnes did the thinking, Agnes is the inventor. You can’t buy inventorship. You can’t inherit it. And you definitely can’t murder a tortoise and forge a document and expect the USPTO to thank you for your service.

Messing with inventorship is the fastest way to turn a mild-mannered patent attorney into a fire-breathing dragon. If you want to see smoke coming out of a lawyer’s ears, walk into their office and say, “My boss wants to list himself as the inventor even though he didn’t do anything.” The reaction will be immediate and volcanic.

But here’s where Zootopia 2 gets things hilariously wrong: forging a patent. The movie acts like you can just slip a piece of paper into a drawer at the patent office and, boom, you’ve rewritten history. In reality, patents have digital filings, electronic signatures, declarations, timestamps, and paper trails deeper than a forest. The Lynxleys supposedly pulled off a forgery that would require hacking government databases, fabricating electronic records, and retroactively inserting documents into a system that didn’t even exist in their time.

And then there’s the idea of a secret patent. In the movie, the patent is treated like a mystical relic, the kind of thing Indiana Jones would find after dodging boulders. But real patents? They’re public. The word “patent” literally means open in Latin. If you want to find a patent for a giant climate-control device? You look it up. There is no treasure vault guarded by emotionally unstable meerkats.

Then we get to the journal. Yes, journals and notebooks can show who came up with something, but since the U.S. moved to a first-inventor-to-file system, they don’t win you the patent. It doesn’t matter if your diagrams are beautiful or if your origin story is heartwarming. What matters is: you filed first. And Agnes actually did, the movie literally shows she had the original patent, so the journal is emotionally moving but legally… not so relevant.

Now, one thing the movie gets right is that patents can change society. They really can. Major inventions reshape industries and daily life. We don’t get smartphones, electric cars, life-saving medical devices, or those gadgets that promise to spiralize vegetables into a lifestyle if we don’t have inventors protected by a system that rewards innovation.

But in real life, patent fights are much less dramatic. No one is overthrowing a municipal government over a forged patent. Most disputes come down to things like: what does “wirelessly connected” actually mean? Or is this toaster design truly “non-obvious”? Or can someone prove they really invented a design before someone else filed for it?

So what’s the takeaway?

For inventors: file early. Don’t rely on journals. And if a wealthy lynx family takes an interest in your work, maybe password-protect your documents.

For everyone else: the next time a movie treats a patent like a magical scroll, just know that somewhere, in a quiet office with fluorescent lighting, a patent attorney is laughing. Or crying. Or both.

I’m actually a movie geek and I stay for all of the credits. If there’s a movie where american actors are speaking with foreign accents, I want to know who is credited as the dialect coach. William Conacher and Tim Monich, real big fan of your dialect work. Anyway, for this movie I wasn’t staying for the dialect coach credit  because I wanted to see in the credits this crack legal team was that messed up patent law. 

I literally sat there with my phone and took a photo of the credits when the name of the people on the legal team scrolled up. Then I came home and looked up all seven of the people listed. Now, I’m not going to name names, you can pause when this comes out on streaming and verify for yourself, but shocker of all shockers, not one of the seven people listed was a registered patent attorney. So Disney, if you’re listening to me, feel free to hit me up if you need a patent consultant for your next movie. I won’t even charge you. You can just give me and my family a lifetime Disney Magic Key pass, with lifetime lightning lane privileges and we’ll call it even.

And that’s the patent drama of Zootopia 2, a movie where the villains may be cunning, the heroes may be brave, but the real crime was not giving Agnes De’Snake her rightful inventorship.

That’s it for today’s episode, and if you know of any animated animals need help filing a patent application, please send them my way and have them give me a call at 424-281-0162. Until next time, I’m Adam Diament, and keep on inventing!