A copyright infringement case against Taylor Swift was dismissed with prejudice, which means that the plaintiff cannot file another claim involving the same issue. The trial was to begin on January 17, 2023. The dispute involved the Swift song "Shake it Off," released...
Sweden's Epidemic Sound has a catalog of 38,000 pieces of music spread across 160 genres. These are designed for use in video content, film and television production, podcasts, streaming platforms, and other media. Recently valued at $1.4 billion, the company filed a...
Government agencies often announce plans to revamp or create new regulations before making final decisions. This approach allows citizens and businesses to weigh in with opinions on the proposed changes. Such is now the case with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO),...
The craft beer community is often collegial based on the “us against them” paradigm. In this case, “us” is the small independent breweries that have popped up by the thousands across the United States, and “them” is Miller, Budweiser and a handful of other large...
Lynn Goldsmith was hired to photograph Prince in 1981 for a Newsweek article just as the musician's star was rising. The photographer was famous for shooting musicians' portraits and album covers. She shot him performing live and invited him to her studio for more...
The Supreme Court of the United ruled in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, cleared up some contradictory rulings among the Circuit Courts. Generally speaking, a work of authorship is subject to copyright protection if it is sufficiently...
Copyright is typically owned by the party who created or authored the work, unless the author assigns the rights, or it is a "work made for hire." A work made for hire is developed or created by an employee whose responsibilities include authoring the subject work or...
Photography, like any other form of art, is subject to intellectual property and copyright law. Photography can involve more than one party when the subject of the art is a person; a model. While the photographer is considered the creator or "author" under copyright...
Scraping a copyrighted photograph from the internet and publicly displaying it (on a website, in an ad, etc.) without the copyright owner's permission amounts to copyright infringement, plain and simple. Sometimes, however, individuals and businesses make the mistake...
A federal law called the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) provides protections for visual artists against physical alteration or false attribution of their artwork (referred to as artists' "moral rights"). These rights are separate and distinct from other copyright...
