When the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo’s wedding video, set to Coldplay’s song “Fix You,” went viral on YouTube, the videographer, Joe Simon Wedding Films, thought it would be great publicity for his business. Instead, Joe Simon was threatened with a $150,000 lawsuit for not having purchased a license for the music rights. He quickly and quietly settled the lawsuit. His company and many other wedding videographers proceeded to take down their work from the Internet for fear of similar lawsuits. From a technical standpoint, it’s clear that Simon violated a basic principle of copyright law by using the song…
Menu
Archives: New Media Law
Trademark Bullying
November 9, 2011
Trademark owners have a right and an obligation to actively protect their trademarks from misuse. Failure to do so may result in consequences such as consumers being confused as to the source of the goods or services, harm to the trademark owner’s reputation, lost sales, and, eventually, loss of the trademark rights altogether. There is a fine line, however, between actively protecting one’s trademark and bullying other businesses into dropping their trademark because the two marks are vaguely similar. What is trademark bullying, and what can be done about it?
Copyright Small Claims?
November 2, 2011
The Copyright Act protects many works that may not have great commercial value. When a copyrighted work, like a photograph, is used without permission, there is often not a significant amount of economic damage to the copyright owner, and the costs of bringing a lawsuit against the infringer may actually dissuade them from filing a lawsuit. Imagine someone takes one of your Facebook photos and uses it on her personal website without your permission. Your copyright in that photo has been infringed, but what are you going to do about it? In the real world, this type of infringement usually…
Are Cloud Music Services Legal?
September 8, 2011
Over a decade ago, a teenage Sean Parker took on the music establishment with his basement project Napster and the industry has never been the same since. While Napster was ultimately shut down, various online music download services have continued to sprout up. The latest trend involves “Cloud Music Services” such as Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player and Google’s Music Beta, both of which launched within the last 6 months. Music “clouds” are services that store your music on the Web and allow you to stream those songs to any computer or mobile device, such as a computer or…
