Posts Tagged: "entertainment industry"

It’s not just businesses and corporate environments that need intellectual property protection – artists of all kinds must protect their work too. Specifically, musicians have a lot to copyright and trademark – band names, original music, and album art, to name a few… When it comes to YouTube, today, musicians should pay close attention to monetization of their IP rights, according to Umanoff. This means making sure that YouTube has reference files, which are samples of the copyrighted materials, so that YouTube can attempt to recognize an artist’s work when incorporated in user-generated content.She said, “The artist must also ensure that their reference files contain accurate metadata so that YouTube knows who to pay when copyrighted works are streamed. Independent companies specializing in confirming that YouTube content is monetized by uploading reference files and manually checking metadata are emerging and growing a new frontier of music technologists.”

Entertainment and business litigation law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert LLP announces that Aaron Liskin has become a Partner of the Firm. Mr. Liskin handles a wide range of litigation matters, including entertainment, intellectual property and general commercial litigation. Most recently, he represented screenwriter Nicholas Kazan in his lawsuit over compensation for writing services and executive producer credits on the recently released Martin Scorsese film, Silence.

In the official complaint filed by McCartney, the British rock legend is seeking to reclaim ownership of the Beatles copyrights under provisions of the Copyright Act, as amended in 1976. Section 304(c) of that legislation gives authors the right to terminate transfers to reclaim copyright interests for copyrights that were assigned to transferred to third parties before January 1st, 1978. Living authors, or surviving family members of authors who have died, have a five-year period starting 56 years from the date the copyright was secured during which they can send advance notice to copyright holders notifying them of an intent to terminate the copyright transfer.

We know that not only are copyrights grounded in the constitution, but core copyright industries contribute approximately $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy annually, and employ over 5.5 million American workers. At the same time, however, we are acutely aware that, unfortunately, copyright theft online is rampant, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has increasingly become ill equipped to address even flagrant, willful copyright infringement in the digital world. What we don’t know, however, is how President-Elect Trump and the Trump Administration will view copyright issues, and whether pro-creator copyright reforms will be on the President’s agenda come January 20, 2017. We can, however, make some educated guesses based on Trump’s entertainment industry ties, his potential Supreme Court nominees, and those he is surrounding himself with on his Transition Team and in a Trump Administration that is increasingly taking shape.

Entities owning the copyrights to music created by the late pop star Prince had filed suit against Roc Nation, the entertainment company owned by rapper Jay Z, which is affiliated with the streaming music service Tidal. Plaintiffs NPG Records and NPG Music Publishing allege that Tidal and Roc Nation have engaged in copyright infringement by adding a series of 15 unauthorized Prince albums to the Tidal catalog this June. The case is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.

On November 1st, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (8th Cir.) issued a decision in a case brought by motion picture entertainment company Warner Bros. and appealed by a group of defendants who licensed images culled from publicity material for some of Warner’s most famous entertainment properties. A panel from the 8th Cir. found in favor of Warner Bros. and affirmed an earlier verdict, which has helped to define whether publicity material for films and animated shows are available in the public domain. This decision is the second time that 8th Cir. has issued a judgment in this case.

Kanye West, ran into some legal trouble when he was sued for trademark infringement by Michael Medina for using the word “Loisaidas” in the title. Medina began using the name “Loisaidas” in 2008 to refer to a Latin band that he had formed. The band originated from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for which the name came from, as “Loisaidas” is a Spanish slang term for “lower east siders.” … However, the title “Loisaidas” was not found to be explicitly misleading such to induce members of the public to believe the “work” was either created by or about Medina’s music group. In October 2016, Medina appealed the case to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

On Tuesday, August 9th, Ed Sheeran was named as a defendant in a copyright lawsuit filed by three heirs of American singer-songwriter Lee Townsend. Townsend, who passed away in 2003, was Marvin Gaye’s co-writer for his famous song “Let’s Get It On.” The suit, which also lists among the defendants Warner Music Group, Atlantic Records UK, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Amy Wadge, Sheeran’s co-writer on “Thinking Out Loud,” alleges that the song “copied the heart” of “Let’s Get It On” and repeated copyright infringing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic compositions throughout the song. The case, Griffin et al v. Sheeran et al, has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.).

With the deaths of Prince and David Bowie earlier in the year, the process by which celebrity estates monetize the images and other intellectual property (IP) of the dearly departed has come into greater focus. How will they handle the onslaught of business from rights to their images and other non-musical IP? Unlike recordings and music publishing, which are covered by national law, individual states determine rights of publicity. Specifically, copyrights are federal and can be inherited by heirs such as in the Marvin Gaye case.

Things have changed in a way because technology has allowed sampling of very specific parts of songs to take place sometimes without written prior acknowledgement or permission from the original artist. I think in music, going back many decades, people have always been lifting ideas from one another and interjecting those bits of ideas as musical “flavors” into songs. The lifted parts were brief and the influence might have been subtle, but noticeable. Guitar players have lifted licks or phrases off of the old Blues artists, and continue to this day. So this is really nothing new. But to extract specific parts of an existing song and make it the basis of a “new” song for me is a stretch and potentially signals a lack of deeper creativity and emotion. If however a musician does this and obtains permission to use from the original copyright holder, then I can respect that.