Did the lyric, “So, I’m tiptoein’ to keep flowin’/I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan” in musician Pitbull’s song “Give Me Everything” violate the rights of actress Lindsay Lohan? Judge Denis Hurley in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York said “no” in a Memorandum and Order in February.
Continue reading “Don’t Mention My Name: Pitbull and Lindsay Lohan in Court”
It’s good to be an Internet Service Provider. While content owners worry about piracy and erosion of copyright, and thus revenue, ISP’s (the companies that provide us with Internet access) do not have substantial copyright worries. They are considered, in effect, common carriers and as a result are generally no more liable for copyright infringement by its customers than the telephone company would be liable if you slander someone during a phone call. The concern is the copyright misbehavior of ISP customers, namely people like us.
The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (the “Board”) has answered the question of who is the true Evil Empire of baseball: “There is only one Evil Empire in baseball and it is the New York Yankees.” In addition to validating the feelings of Boston Red Sox fans, who have believed this point to have been true since Babe Ruth’s contract was sold to the Yankees in 1919, the Board’s administrative action points out that trademarks can originate from all over. [In full disclosure, I’m a long-time Red Sox season ticketholder.]
Continue reading “Whose Evil Empire Is It? Trademarks, Baseball, and the New York Yankees”
Anyone who has worked in reality TV knows that much behind-the-scenes work can be involved in creating drama and comedy that are lacking in the real lives of reality TV show participants. I’ve represented both reality show producers and reality TV stars, and can say there’s much content in reality shows that is fictitious — or at least constitutes a form of induced reality. For example, participants (in other words, characters) are prodded into being villains or buffoons. They are tricked and trapped, all in the name of good entertainment.
Continue reading “Reality Was Never Like This: “Storage Wars””
The prodigiously talented Prince – singer, composer, guitarist, dancer, and more – is also a frequent instigator of litigation. He clearly takes his copyrights seriously. He’s not always as transcendent in the courts as he is in Paisley Park, however.
Continue reading “Prince, The Dancing Baby, Fair Use, and the Takedown”
Book publishers have always set the suggested list price of printed books. Bookstores were free to sell the books to customers like us at any price. In days that seem ancient now, mega-bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble, Walden, and Borders engaged in deep discounting. Many independent bookstores couldn’t compete and they went out of business.
Like any traditional content-based business encountering digital distribution, publishers tried to cling to their old ways. Please refer to the history of the music business over the past decade for how that view of the world worked out.
Celebrity-focused websites are wildly popular. Websites are incredible vacuum cleaners of content. Photographs are easy to copy and publish without authorization. You get the picture: photographs are easy to steal. Photographers are truly challenged in making money from the licensing of their images because of this combination of forces.
In 2010 Kenneth Laurion was admitted to a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. David McKee, M.D., a neurologist examined the patient at the hospital. From the perspective of Mr. Laurion’s family, the examination did not go well.
A confession: I never finished Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time); neither in English nor in French. I did finish Haruki Murakami’s IQ84; all 1186 pages of that book. Moby Dick, too, even the whale dissection parts. I have high hopes for completing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. But I wouldn’t want the author or the publisher to know what I had finished, nor what my lack of time, tedium, or distraction had caused. I wouldn’t want them to know which sections I lingered on and re-read. Some readers of Fifty Shades of Grey might really not want such behavioral information shared.
Continue reading “They Know What You Are Reading – Every Word of It”
