Sports Law

Wall Street Journal reporter Rob Copeland has unearthed another Google data scraping scandal, this time your private health information.  As usual, Google doesn’t want you to focus on how they use this data in the background for data profiling in ways that you don’t know is happening and that you ... Read More

By Yuchen Xie. The Case: The Mayor Gallery Ltd. v. The Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné LLC et al., No. 655489/2016 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2019). The authenticity of an artwork is essential to its value in the art market. If a work once attributed to a renowned artist is subsequently deemed ... Read More

By Angela Peco Edited by Elissa D. Hecker Below, for your browsing convenience, the categories are divided into: Entertainment, Arts, Sports, Media, and General News Entertainment Sandra Bullock and Ellen DeGeneres Sue Websites for False Advertising and Unauthorized Use of Their Name and Likeness The stars filed a lawsuit against ... Read More

From CNN: Both Facebook and YouTube announced on Friday that they are removing mentions of the whistleblower's name from their platforms, citing concerns that such content could could lead to harm and pointing to their policy prohibiting "outing of witness, ... Read More

Tali Teeni-Harari and Sharon Yadin, both of the Peres Academic Center, are publishing Regulatory Literacy: Rethinking Television Rating in the New Media Age in volume 88 of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review (2019). Here is the abstract. Rating ... Read More

Alissa McCain will receive the 2019 Cindi Lazzari Artist Advocate Award from the Texas Entertainment and Sports Law Section (TESLAW) of the State Bar of Texas on November 20 at the InterContinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel.  Alissa has twenty years of dedicated and groundbreaking artist advocacy work that has had ... Read More

On November 5, 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) issued a guide entitled “Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers”[1] and a video “Do you endorse things on social media?” to alert influencers to the laws governing endorsement or recommendation of products or services and provide social media influencers ... Read More

“We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.” Holly Martins in The Third Man by Graham Greene As MTP readers will recall (especially newsletter readers), Spotify is being sued in Nashville by the publishers of a good chunk of Eminem’s extremely popular ... Read More

Creative community mourns the passing of entertainment lawyer Jay Rosenthal — Rosenthal was most recently a partner at the law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp and previously served as general counsel at the National Music Publishers Association. More remembrances here. Argument analysis: Justices pillage state arguments for sovereign immunity for ... Read More

[From 20 Questions for New Artists by Chris Castle and Amy Mitchell] An independent artist is practically required to sign up with an aggregator in order to have your works serviced to many online outlets–some aggregators service hundreds of different retailers. (So one example of a pre-existing contract under Question ... Read More

The latest issue of Music & Copyright is now available for subscribers to download. Here are some of the highlights. Big gains for SoundExchange and PPL boost producers’ and performers’ rights to new level Performance-rights distributions to record companies (producers) and performers registered another record-breaking year in 2018, with total ... Read More

By Lisa Ornest Edited by Elissa D. Hecker Below, for your browsing convenience, the categories are divided into: Entertainment, Arts, Sports, Media, and General News Entertainment No Touching! We're not talking about rape, or even sexual blackmail here, but men (as well as grandmothers, cousins, and aunties), have to learn ... Read More

Chad G. Marzen, Florida State University, has published A Constitutional Right to Public Information. Here is the abstract. In the wake of the 2013 United States Supreme Court decision of McBurney v. Young (569 U.S. 221), this Article calls for ... Read More

[This post first appeared in the MusicTechPolicy Monthly newsletter.  Become an email follower of this blog to get your copy.] The Music Modernization Act is a litigation magnet because of its failure to mandate a wholistic solution to the controversial black box. There are two commercially available systems that can ... Read More

Sunday Riley launched her skincare firm Sunday Riley Modern Skincare, LLC (“SRMS”) in 2009 and its skincare products, including Good Genes, Power Couple, U.F.O., C.E.O., Luna and Tidal, have enjoyed tremendous success, having been featured, promoted, and sold online through Sephora and its website, www. Sephora.com. On October 21, 2019, the ... Read More

CBS is asking a federal district court to dismiss Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax's defamation suit against the network, saying that Mr. Fairfax's claim that an in-house attorney who knew both Mr. Fairfax and one of the women who accused ... Read More

When I started MusicTechPolicy in 2006, Jay Rosenthal was one of the first people in Washington policy circles who embraced me.  This says much more about him than it does about me.  He didn’t need to be particularly courteous to me or even acknowledge I existed.  But he was a ... Read More

Diogenes searched the world for an honest man, and Cloudflare is searching the world for a decider in chief to tell them what to do.  But as we know from Cloudflare’s IPO, Cloudflare need only look within because the insiders have structured the company’s governance so there is clear responsibility–and ... Read More

By Chantelle A. Gyamfi Edited by Elissa D. Hecker Below, for your browsing convenience, the categories are divided into: Entertainment, Arts, Sports, Media, and General News ENTERTAINMENT Rose McGowan Sues Weinstein and Lawyers Claiming Intimidation Actress Rose McGowan filed suit against Harvey Weinstein and two lawyers, David Boies and Lisa ... Read More

Karl Herchenroeder reports in Communications Daily that Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has placed a “hold” on the CASE Act (the legislation creating a copyright small claims court), which essentially stops it from moving forward.  We had heard this hold was in place long ago, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Google) had foreshadowed it ... Read More

By Claudia Ray Attached is brief Ninth Circuit decision issued yesterday, reversing the dismissal pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6) of copyright infringement claims brought by two songwriters against Taylor Swift and others. Plaintiffs Sean Hall and Nathan Butler had alleged that the defendants' 2014 song Shake It Off copied a six-word ... Read More

There is a bit of strategy involved with affiliating with a performing rights organization in the United States. All the societies have a creative staff. The decision to affiliate with a particular society should be made after the artist/writer has taken some meetings with the performing rights society and decided ... Read More

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There is a certain Truman Show aspect to songwriter royalties–the government sets the royalty rates, not arms length negotiation.  But it doesn’t have to be that way, we just accept the government’s role in songwriting because it is the way it has always been for living songwriters and many generations ... Read More

CASE Act passed the House of Representatives Tuesday 410-6. Congressional Record. Roll call vote. Small Claims Copyright ‘CASE Act’ Passes US House of Representatives — “Advocacy organizations for publishers, authors, and copyright applaud the 410-to-6 vote in the House for the long-promoted CASE Act.” For Marginalized Communities, the CASE Act ... Read More

Don’t believe the headlines–just because there’s no money for artists from the PledgeMusic bankruptcy does not mean that the story is over.  It just means that justice is going to take longer.  If you were paying attention, it should have been obvious from the beginning that PledgeMusic was a financial ... Read More

By Laurel Wickersham Salisbury. When commercial art galleries display works of art for sale, they are either purchased by the galleries from artists or collectors outright or accepted on consignment. Due in large part to financial considerations, including sharing in the risk and reducing financial exposure, consignment has become a ... Read More

Emmanuel Elau, Uganda Christian University Faculty of Law, has published The Laws Impacting on Freedom of Expression in Uganda, 2019. Here is the abstract. Freedom of expression in Uganda is a fairly contentious area. The Constitution of Uganda, 1995 provides ... Read More

Leslie Kendrick, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing The Book Has Two Faces: Trevor Ross's Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth Century Britain in Critical Analysis of Law: An International & Interdisciplinary ... Read More

The latest issue of Music & Copyright is now available for subscribers to download. Here are some of the highlights. Global royalty collections see positive year, with growth at reported and constant currency rates The world’s 20 biggest collective management organizations (CMOs) registered an increase in collections last year at ... Read More