Copyright Law

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Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of news articles and stories about police officers playing popular music during a citizen/officer interaction that is being filmed by the citizen.  For example, Vice reported on a Beverly Hills police officer breaking out his phone and playing over a minute of Sublime’s “Santeria” when the officer discovered that his interaction with a well-known LA-area activist was being live-streamed by the citizen via Instagram.  Similarly, Mashable reported that an Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy played a Taylor Swift song during an encounter.  Why is this happening?  There seems to be a belief that police service, when paired with a musical interlude, will prevent a recording of the interaction from being posted on social media due to algorithms that detect and remove videos incorporating copyrighted music (among other types of content).
Continue Reading Don’t Film So Close To Me: Can Copyrighted Music Keep Vids of Police Encounters Off The Internet?

In this week’s episode of The Briefing from the IP Law Blog, Josh Escovedo and Scott Hervey discuss an update to the litigation over Andy Warhol’s series of portraits of the artist Prince (Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). They provide a recap of last week’s episode, which covers the Second Circuit decision in favor of Goldsmith, the photographer whose image Warhol used to create the Prince Portraits, and the holding that Warhol’s renditions were not transformative enough to be fair use. That decision overturned a lower court decision in favor of the Warhol Foundation.
Continue Reading The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Andy Warhol’s Prince Prints – Not Fair Use!? (Part Two)

In this week’s episode, Josh Escovedo and Scott Hervey discuss the litigation over Andy Warhol’s series of portraits of the artist Prince (Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). Their discussion covers the Second Circuit decision in favor of Goldsmith, the photographer whose image Warhol used to create the Prince Portraits, and the holding that Warhol’s renditions were not transformative enough to be fair use. The decision overturned a lower court decision in favor of the Warhol Foundation.
Continue Reading The Briefing – Andy Warhol’s Prince Prints: Not Fair Use!? (Part One)

In this week’s episode, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss the complex process of clearing titles for Film and Television. They cover recent high-stakes litigation around entertainment titles, including Stouffer v. National Geographic Partners LLC,  Jon Astor-White v. Daniel Strong (Empire), and the “Honey Badger” case.
Continue Reading The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: What’s in a Name: Clearing Titles for Film and Television

We recently wrote about a case in the Southern District of New York against Mashable relating to the embedding of content from social media platforms like Instagram.  In that case, the court held that Instagram’s terms of use (which were accepted by the plaintiff, a photographer, when he created an Instagram account) were insufficiently clear to allow Mashable to escape liability for publishing Instagram content through the process of embedding.  Thereafter, the parties settled out of court.  Legal watchers speculated that the ruling would encourage copyright infringement claims based on the embedding of content.
Continue Reading Instagram Faces Claims That It Encouraged Media Companies to Illegally Embed Images Posted to Instagram by Users