On August 30, 2017, the Ninth Circuit published an amended opinion in Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal, a case which concerns the situations under which social media websites and other internet service providers can be held liable for copyright infringement for content submitted by users. The amended opinion removed language from the original opinion that could

Fans of the Discovery Channel’s survival television programs may be familiar with reality stars Mykel Hawke, previously featured in the channel’s program Man, Woman, Wild, and Mykel’s former military colleague, Joseph Teti, star of Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival. Hawke and Teti were, at one time, friends as well as business partners. The relationship ultimately deteriorated

In a decision highlighting the subtleties of trademark law and claimed “parody” websites, Will Applebee, a lawyer-turned-sports writer, has successfully defended his sports humor website, NOTSportsCenter.com, against ESPN’s recent efforts to seize its domain name to protect its flagship brand. ESPN’s SportsCenter is a popular daily sports news television program that offers breaking news, highlights,

On July 26, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a copyright infringement claim brought by Sid Bernstein Presents, LLC (“SBP”) (owner by assignment of the intellectual property rights of the late music and event producer, Sid Bernstein, “Bernstein”) against Apple Corps Limited (a company founded by members of

In 1994, a computer scientists named Nick Szabo—a man many believe to be the creator of Bitcoin—outlined, in a blog post, how the need for corporate counsel would eventually be eliminated and replaced by a concept similar to vending machines. Now, two decades after Szabo’s original post, cutting-edge clients have begun to ask whether legal

Fyre festival, vigorously promoted by “social media influencers” such as Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski as a “luxury” music festival with tickets ranging in price from $1,200 to over $100,000 per person, was scheduled to take place over two weekends in April and two weekends in May on the “private” Bahamian island of

In a nearly unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court recently limited the rights of patent holders to enforce post-sale restrictions on how patented products may be used, reversing a prior decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The case involved a dispute between Lexmark International, Inc., a manufacturer of toner cartridges used

On June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its much-anticipated decision in Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. __ (2017), issuing a ruling that clarifies that the door is open to trademark registration to a new category of trademarks:  trademarks that may disparage others. The facts that the Court looked at are relatively simple: 

WGA writers, particularly as they advance in their careers, often end up engaged in both their capacity as writers as well as in an additional non-writing capacity, such as executive producers.  Article 14 of the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) is therefore an important provision to understand for both writers and anyone engaging them; it

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled this month that Google’s trademark has not lapsed into the public domain by becoming generic even though today’s digital vernacular uses “google” as a verb synonymous with searching the Internet.  As a general rule, generic terms used as trademarks are not protectable