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Interview with Alan Rothenberg, Former President of U.S. Soccer
Mr. Rothenberg is Los Angeles Chairman of 1st Century Bank, a division of MidFirst Bank and Chairman of Premier Partnerships. Rothenberg spearheaded soccer’s rise in the U.S. during the 1990s as Chairman and CEO of the 1994 World Cup; Chairman of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup; President of the U.S. Soccer Federation; Chairman of the U.S. Soccer Foundation; and founder of Major League Soccer. For his accomplishments, FIFA bestowed upon him its coveted Order of Merit and he was inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame. Rothenberg was also a top executive in the NBA during the 1970s and […]
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What’s Copyright Got to Do, Got to Do With It?
By Shayna Toh The “cockroach of Broadway” seems to keep cashing checks. Despite the sneering term that veteran theatre critic Jesse Green used to describe jukebox musicals, the genre has dominated Broadway in recent years. In an industry that always seems to battle existential threats and huge financial losses—twelve current Broadway productions are slated to close for good this winter—musicals in the jukebox form seem to be one of theater’s last few buttresses in financial viability. Jukebox musicals—musicals where the score consists of existing well-known pop songs instead of original music—are highly contentious in theater. While they constantly invoke the ire […]
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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, the Supreme Court should use Vidal v. Elster to clarify that trademarks are speech and that they enjoy the full protections of the First Amendment. The story of this case begins in 2016. Candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination traded jabs on the debate stage about the relative sizes of their hands and the resulting implications about their […]
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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 live next to. Specifically, the Union of European Football Associations (“UEFA”) should establish two new tournaments—one for mid-table clubs and a second for clubs near the bottom of leagues across Europe. The top eight European leagues could each have their two teams in the middle of the table compete against each other in a 16-team, single elimination tournament occurring at the end of the season. […]
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Interview with Joi Rideout, Senior Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs at Warner Bros. Discovery
By Daijha Morrow Joi Rideout is currently the Senior Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs for Unscripted Television at Warner Bros. Discovery. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Rideout has had an illustrious career in the entertainment industry. During her career, she has supervised business and legal affairs for numerous unscripted programs and their digital ancillaries including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, TMZ, EXTRA, The Real, Judge Mathis, Peoples’ Court, Crime Watch Daily, Candidly Nicole, Punk’d and numerous other documentary films and reality programming. Prior to managing the development and production of unscripted television, Rideout also served as a business […]
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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 symbols that identify a seller’s goods and distinguish them from others in the marketplace. Consider the Nike swoosh or, simply, the name Coca-Cola. Trademarks may be used by non-owners under the protections of the First Amendment by, for example, speaking a company’s name in a film’s dialogue. In these cases, the public’s interest in free speech is high […]
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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 October 9th. This newly secured deal runs from until May 31, 2026, and comes three months after the Directors Guild (DGA) ratified their deal with the AMPTP. SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP have yet to come to an agreement. In each of these negotiations, language governing AI has been a sticking point. The unions, particularly the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, recognized […]
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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 148-day long strike, allowing over 11,000 writers to return to work under a new deal that the leadership has called “exceptional” with “meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.” In its summary of the deal’s terms, the WGA describes sixteen points of consideration in its agreement with the Alliance of […]
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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 new game in the same genre, under what circumstances would the distribution of that new game violate the rights of the original game’s owner? The authors argue that copyright law is uncertain on several issues related to the training of AI models and the use of those models to create new works of authorship. […]
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Volume 14, Issue 2 is Live!
We are pleased to announce that our Summer Issue of Volume 14 has been released and is live here. We are so grateful for our authors and the incredible pieces that they wrote. First we have an essay by Professors Alex Sinatra and Trayveon Williams, College Athletics and NIL: Perspectives from a Practitioner and an Athlete, which provides unique perspectives on the emerging world of NIL and how student athletes are leveraging NIL laws to their advantage. Professors Jorge Contreras and Dave Fagundes wrote The Life Story Rights Puzzle, a piece diving into the legal rights and customs surrounding life rights, […]
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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 companies developing AI-powered large language models. These models, often referred to as LLMs, are algorithms that utilize artificial intelligence and massive datasets to generate natural-sounding text in response to prompts. ChatGPT, owned by defendant OpenAI, is the most popular LLM, which now tallies more than 100M users. OpenAI feeds on enormous datasets to develop its capabilities. Awad and Tremblay don’t want to be part […]
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The 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 a way to watch my beloved Washington Commanders. I had just moved away from the Washington, D.C., region to Boston, and with that relocation, abandoned the Commanders’ media market. If I subscribed to cable, the New England Patriots would be shown on Sunday afternoons. I would only be able to watch […]