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

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.