Is copyright a good thing or is copyright just in the way? Ok, I’m a copyright lawyer so you might be able to guess what I’ll say.
Thanks to changing and less-protective copyright laws and the Internet, there is so much more content available than ever. But it’s tough for copyright creators to be in the middle of the economic changes – and to make money.
Continue reading “Is Copyright Working Well for the Copyright “Middle Class”?”
You wouldn’t think that there was much protectable intellectual property in the classic “Hangman” word game. In Hangman, as you probably know, one player thinks of a word or phrase and the second player tries to figure out what it is. The word or phrase is initially represented by a fixed number of dashes, which comprise the number of letters that it contains.
The wildly successful TV show Wheel of Fortune is based on the Hangman game. If you’re interested in more details about how to play the game, as much (or even more) than you are in reading about the intellectual property issues please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman_(game).
Continue reading “Hangman Lives to Pursue a Copyright Claim”
International singing star Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty to the court) won a lawsuit in July in England against the Top Shop stores over the manufacture and sale of an unauthorized T-Shirt bearing her image. Merchandise (such as T-shirts, jackets, buttons) is a very big business; so the respective rights of celebrities and merchants are important. I frequently work on licenses and litigation in this area and know firsthand how valuable these rights are – and how seriously infringements are taken.
In the United States, celebrities routinely win such cases because the US recognizes a celebrity’s “right of publicity” — that’s the right to control most commercial exploitations of a celebrity’s name, likeness, and biographical details.
Continue reading “The T- Shirt Found No Love – Rihanna Wins in Court”
