Music streaming giant Pandora famously paid a $90 million dollar settlement in 2015 to many of the major record labels for streaming music produced before 1972 without the proper licensing under federal copyright law. Now, Pandora has found itself in hot water again for allegedly violating the copyright rights of artists. On February 7, 2022, the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin filed suit in California Federal Court against Pandora for “willfully” streaming the late comedian’s routines without permission from the copyright holders. In its complaint, Los Angeles firm King & Ballow, representing the comedians’ estates, allege the legendary [...]

Defamation suits against public figures are notoriously difficult to maintain. Public figures are held to a higher burden of proof in defamation cases and, according to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan case, must show not only that they were defamed, but that the defamatory statement was made according to the stringent “actual malice” standard. We witnessed how difficult it is to meet this standard just last week, when a federal jury in Manhattan returned a verdict against Sarah Palin in her defamation suit against the New York Times over a 2017 editorial linking the ex-politician [...]

Recently, country music trio Lady Antebellum changed their name to “Lady A” in the wake of the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter movement. (The old name carried an uncomfortable connection with the pre-Civil War, slave-holding South). But there was a problem: Since the early 1990s, Seattle blues singer Anita White had been using the stage name Lady A. At first, it seemed the two parties would settle the matter of who could use the name amicably and out of court. But negotiations broke down in July of 2020, when the band formerly known as Lady Antebellum filed an [...]

NFTs (or Non-Fungible Tokens) have become the new investment craze - surpassing $40 billion in transactions in 2021. A growing number of celebrities are jumping in on the action, with stars like Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, and The Weeknd all ‘dropping’ their own NFTs or going public about their big investments in the new technology. Even the ever-mercurial Elon Musk temporarily got in on the game, reporting he would sell his song about NFTs as an NFT before backing out and labeling the new NFT-obsessed digital landscape as a ‘sign of mental illness’. The speed with which the [...]