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

Enterprising corporations looking to join the “green rush” and cash in on the marijuana boom have found a loophole in the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) refusal to register trademarks for products that contain cannabis.  By registering a trademark for ancillary products not related to marijuana, such as clothing or accessories, corporations can

Earlier today, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a new release of its electronic system used to designate and search for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) agents. Under the DMCA, a qualified online service provider (OSP) is not liable for copyright infringement with respect to infringing material residing on the OSP’s network if, upon notification of

On May 2nd, The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) reached an eleventh-hour agreement on a new three-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that averts a pending strike by the writers that was scheduled to begin that day. The agreement was announced in a joint statement by

On April 7, in a decision with far-reaching implications for websites that allow users to post content, the Ninth Circuit reopened a paparazzi photo agency’s copyright lawsuit against the social media website LiveJournal. In doing so, the court reversed a lower court ruling in LiveJournal’s favor. The photo agency, Mavrix Photographs, sued LiveJournal over twenty

One of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (“DMCA”) cardinal features is protection for internet service providers against copyright infringement claims based on content provided by third parties (the “Safe Harbor”).  Without the DMCA Safe Harbor, countless websites that allow their users to upload or post content would risk liability for the actions of those users. 

On April 5th, in a victory for visual content creators and licensors, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by former college athletes alleging that T3Media had misappropriated their names and likenesses by selling licenses to photographs from the NCAA Photo Library. The Ninth Circuit held that the athletes’ claims for right

On April 3, 2017, President Trump officially signed into law a controversial new bill that repeals the Internet privacy rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) in late 2016 (the “FCC Rules”).  The FCC rules, which were set to go into effect in late 2017, required Internet service providers (“ISPs”), such as Verizon, AT&T,

In an opinion issued last week, the Supreme Court held that a “pictorial, graphic, or sculptural” feature incorporated into the design of a useful article—in this case, a cheerleading uniform—is eligible for copyright protection if it satisfies a two-part test: (1) the element can be perceived as a two- or three-dimensional work of art separate