The last decade has been kind to Marvel Studios and their parent company, Disney. Yet, long before this recent success, the Marvel brand was best known for its comics and television cartoons based on those characters in the 1980s and 1990s. One of those shows was...
Nowadays, your URL is as big a part of your business branding as are company and product names. Domain name protection is a fast-growing area of intellectual property law as the threats to domain names - which trademark often protects - are real and aggressive. A...
Some of the biggest names in rock 'n' roll history have played Gibson's distinctive Flying V guitar, including Jimi Hendrix, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Pete Townshend of the Who, Johnny Winter, Paul Stanley of Kiss and many more. The electric instrument looks just like...
Making it as a songwriter is no easy task. Once a song becomes famous, artists rely on earnings from continued use of the songs, often on the radio. Radio stations who fail to pay artists for the use of their songs can face legal ramifications.A current lawsuit...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, known as the USPTO, filed a petition in July with the U.S. Supreme Court. The agency is asking the high court to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. The appeals court held that while "booking" is a...
Since 2014, Led Zeppelin and Michael Skidmore, trustee of the trust that owns rights in a song by a deceased musician, have been fighting in court about whether Zepp's iconic "Stairway to Heaven" infringes on the copyright for "Taurus." As we described in this space...
No married couple in history has sold more musical recordings than Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter and her husband Shawn Corey Carter, better known professionally as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, of course. The California residents' twins were born in the state,...
When you look at ’s skyline, you can immediately pick out the iconic Transamerica Pyramid, Salesforce Tower, 181 Fremont, California Center and other architectural landmarks. While the skyline of Indianapolis is not as well-known as ours, it is undoubtedly just...
In January, we wrote about a copyright infringement case in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California that survived a motion to dismiss some of the claims because the court found that the photographer-plaintiff Peter Menzel alleged facts...
At our law firm, we represent people who are fighting to protect their exclusive right to use their persona commercially under state right-of-publicity law. The law encompasses an individual's right to use their own "name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness"...
