By Cheshire Rigler Can a band member post photographs of their concerts to their webpage or social media if they are taken by an unrelated photographer? Can the Instagram posts and stories of social media influencers contain copyrighted music? If a “how-to” post features the trademarks of competing products, does that violate intellectual [...]
by Madeline Rains, edited by BNSesq The backbone of Marvel Comics has always been the wealth of intellectual property possessed by the company. Its success was based around complete ownership of its characters, until Marvel ultimately sold its film rights for select characters to other studios in the 1990’s, following financial turmoil. Marvel’s struggle [...]
Editors Note: Today we begin an intriguing series of articles regarding the relevance of intellectual property concepts in an age in which the likes of John Perry Barlow, founder of the EFF, have declared that because everything can be reduced to digital existence, the need to protect creations of the mind is irrelevant. We [...]
UPDATE - Since this article was written in 2017, the CLASSICS Act was incorporated in the Music Modernization Act, passed in December 2019. The plight of the “starving artist” is timeless and history is replete with stories of songwriters and artist being exploited for their intellectual contributions. In the mid 1800’s, when Stephen Foster wrote The [...]
By Drew Harris How delicious are those 11 “secret herbs and spices” assembled by Harland Sanders in 1930 for his popular “Kentucky Fried Chicken” sold at his local service station? It was so “finger lickin’ good” popular that the Governor Ruby Laffoon proclaimed him a “Colonel” and he started franchising his chicken business. But rather [...]
By Erin Thiele and Barry Neil Shrum, Esq. In the mid-1980s, Donald Trump approached Tony Schwartz to ghost write his autobiography. At this point in time, Trump was in his early 30s and did not have a great deal of life experiences about which to write a personal biography. So, according to Schwartz, he [...]
The first of the month (August 2016), the Department of Justice issued a summary of findings with regard to two court orders that govern the operation of two of the U.S. performing rights organizations (the “PRO’s”), ASCAP and BMI. If it stands, the decision will also affect the third PRO, SESAC.Songwriters and music publishers around [...]
by Erin Thiele and Morgan Wisted NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE. Casey Dienel is suing Justin Bieber and his producer, Sonny Moore, p/k/a Skrillex, (among other defendants) for copyright infringement involving her song, Ring the Bell, from which she claims the Bieb stole musical riffs for his hit Sorry. She claims that the [...]
“[E]very man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his….”[1] John Locke - a political and social philosopher of 17th Century Enlightenment England and the father of “Classical Liberalism” - was [...]
My associate, John Inniger, does a nice job of covering the basics of the Thicke/Williams litigation against the estate of Marvin Gaye in this LOR post. But since a jury verdict in favor of the Gaye Estate rendered a $7.1M verdict earlier this month, the social media and blogosphere has been abuzz with commentary pro and con on [...]
