Supreme Court Considers Whether President Trump’s Name May Be Trademarked to Ridicule Him
By Alec Winshel In November 2023, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Vidal v. Elster. Their coming opinion will be the high court’s latest pronouncement on the relationship between trademark law and the First Amendment’s free speech protections. In my view,...
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Enabling the Non-Elite: Imagining International Football Tournaments for Mid- and Bottom-Table Teams
By Martin Skladany, Law Professor, Penn State University, Dickinson Law The inequality between the gilded elite football clubs and all other teams is widening. One way to address this concern is to create more European football tournaments for the clubs most people...
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Free Speech is a Funny Thing: Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products Narrows First Amendment Protections for Trademark Usage
Image Courtesy of Foodie Factor/Pixabay By Alec Winshel In Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment does not protect use of another’s trademark as a signifier of one’s own product. Trademarks are words or...
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Hollywood Unions Take Different Approaches to AI Protections
Both the DGA and WGA Negotiated AI Guardrails with the AMPTP. Can SAG-AFTRA? By Hugh Reynolds The 148-day writers’ strike ended when the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) ratified their contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on...
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A New Kind of Contract for a New Kind of Entertainment Industry
By Shayna Toh The recent return of familiar hosts to late night TV after a five-month hiatus marked the beginning of the end to one of the entertainment industry’s biggest battles in recent years. On October 2nd, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted to end their...
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AI Generated Video Games Are Coming: How Do Game Developers Protect Rights in Their IP?
Stuart Irvin,[*] Winslow Taub[†] and Sam Jungyun Choi[‡] Click here to download a PDF of this article. AI generated video games are coming. What remedies does a video game publisher have when its game is used to train an AI model? If the resulting model generates a...
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Authors File Complaint Against OpenAI for Copyright Infringement
By: Alec Winshel Last month, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for infringement of their works. The complaint is another in a series of cases filed by Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm that mount legal challenges against...
read moreESTABLISHMENT OF THE NBA “BUBBLE” GUIDELINES FOR THE RESUMPTION OF THE 2019-20 SEASON
(PDF Version Here) Eric Zilber[*] TABLE OF CONTENTS[†] Introduction COVID-19 Background The Challenges Facing the NBA Initial Planning The “Bubble” Emerges as a Front-Runner “Bubble” Plans Solidify and the Protocols Phase One Phase Two Phase Three Phase Three-A Phase...
read moreAll I Want for Christmas is Full Damages for Copyright Infringement
By: Daniel Imakyure Introduction In June 2022, Andy Stone, a.k.a. Vince Vance, brought a copyright infringement action in the US District Court of the Eastern District of Louisiana against singer Mariah Carey, producer Walter Afanasieff, and Sony Music...
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When “Gravy” meets “Roll”: The Future of Interpolation in Music Recording
By: Lea Washington What do you get when you put a roll and gravy together? A lawsuit apparently. The “Rickrollin’” star Rick Astley is suing upcoming rapper Yung Gravy and his team. Gravy’s song “Betty” is the focus of this dispute, as it borrows from the song “Never...
read moreThe Future of NFL Broadcasting
By: Ben Reichard The first Sunday kicking off the 2022 NFL season was just days away. Like millions of fans across the country, I was both hopeful and anxious for how my team would start the season. But I had another reason to be nervous: I couldn’t figure out...
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States Can Use Advertising and Consumer Protection Law to Avoid Rolling the Dice with Online Sports Betting
By: Brandon McCoy Prior to Super Bowl Sunday, one of the most popular gambling days of the year, Massachusetts opened sportsbooks in its three brick-and-mortar casinos: Encore Boston Harbor, MGM Springfield, and Plainridge Park Casino. The state joined 32...
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