"It says to America that small companies can get justice," Johnnie Cochran Jr., an attorney for the plaintiffs, said afterward.

"They had the idea, and you can't take someone's ideas in America, and that's what this company did." The jury decided Disney's conduct was willful and malicious, which allows the trial judge to double the award at a hearing to be set later.

Disney general counsel Lou Meisinger said the company would appeal, challenging what he said were prejudicial statements in closing arguments and improper evidence."We're not knocked out," he said.

"The notion that we had to steal this idea is utterly preposterous. This verdict will not stand. This is an aberrational verdict and a one-time thing."

Disney executives denied using anybody else's ideas for the Wide World of Sports complex, the spring training home of the Atlanta Braves, at Walt Disney World.The judge severely limited the scope of what jurors could consider by adopting jury instructions that said the architecture, site plan and business plan for the sports complex weren't copied from All Pro and could not be considered.All Pro claimed 88 similarities between its plans and the Disney complex and documented more than 200 telephone calls with Disney executives.

Mr. Stracick, a retired baseball umpire from Buffalo, N.Y., and Mr. Russell, an architect from Fonthill, Ontario, testified they pitched their idea for a sports complex to Disney officials in the late 1980s.Four years after Disney officials rejected their plans in 1989, the company announced it would build a $100 million complex. It opened in 1997. One alternate juror, dismissed from the case before deliberations began because he wasn't needed on the jury, said he would have decided against Disney and awarded the full request of $1.4 billion in damages to teach the entertainment giant a lesson.

-- (The Wall Street Journal)