The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) has joined the growing support for the Music Modernization Act. Due to state-by-state legislation that governs mechanical royalties, the current state of copyright legislation is incredibly complicated for songwriters to navigate. This legislation scheme has resulted in songwriters and publishers not receiving due royalties along with a host of […]
As Disney is gearing up to establish its own streaming service, it has started cracking down on unauthorized digital downloads of its works. In November 2017, Disney sued the video rental company Redbox for breaching the terms and conditions of their licensing agreement as well as violating Disney’s copyrights in their motion pictures. In the complaint, Disney
According to The New York Times, the man behind the cyber attack on HBO this summer has been indicted on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, identity theft and extortion. Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national, hacked into HBO’s system under the pseudonym “Skote Vahshat”, where he stole data from May to August. Additionally, Mesri released
Over the summer, Disney and Pixar were sued by childhood development expert Denise Daniels over the film Inside Out. She claims that the film was based on her TV show, The Moodsters, and that she was uncompensated for her work. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, there are some similarities between the two films as both conceptualize the emotions as
The 9th Circuit heard oral arguments last week on whether or not recent digital remasterings of pre-1972 songs were fundamentally different enough from their original recordings to qualify as new intellectual property and thus be covered under Federal Copyright Law. In an appeal filed by ABS Entertainment last year, the company argues that the District
Statutory damages for a willful copyright infringement for a single work can reach $150,000, but the average cost of litigating a copyright case is around $278,000. Even though copyright theft affects the majority of copyright owners, a small minority in reality enforce those rights and receive due compensation. As a potential solution, Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
Even though The Cosby Show has been pulled from broadcast, the show’s producers have filed a copyright lawsuit against BBC and Sugar Films for allegedly using a substantial amount of copyrighted material for a documentary called Bill Cosby: Fall of an American Icon, which depicts the sexual assault scandal that Bill Cosby was embroiled in these past
Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a report on “online and physical marketplaces that reportedly engage in and facilitate substantial copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting,” called the Notorious Markets List. As part of creating the report, the USTR requests the aid of the public to identify these marketplaces through
Disney doesn’t want you to hire “Big Hairy Guy,” a Chewbacca lookalike, for your child’s next birthday party. Disney and its corporate affiliates have filed a lawsuit against Characters For Hire, LLC (“CFH”) for copyright and trademark infringement. Though CFH changes the names of many of its characters, such as Darth Vader to “Dark Lord,”
As digital music streaming continues to explode, it calls for a platform that can track the data generated from billions of clicks and collect royalties for artists. Kobalt, the independent music services company founded in 2000, has been focusing on such a platform since Paul McCartney took his music publishing interest from EMI to Kobalt
Streaming companies and major film studios have joined forces to sue TickBox, the company behind TickBox TV, a device that offers its users easy access to free online content. The complaint filed on Friday, October 13 by companies such as Universal, Disney, Hulu and Netflix, has alleged that TickBox sells “illegal access to Plaintiff’s copyrighted
