After close to three years of litigation, a copyright battle over whether the nation’s most sung song belongs to the public or a music publisher has finally been settled. The popular birthday celebration song that we’ve all grown up singing,…
Appropriation is commonplace in today’s art world. But what happens when the appropriator appropriates too much? Richard Prince has made a name for himself as a well-known appropriation artist. Naturally the use of a copyrighted image without permission of the…
On November 10, 2015, Federal Magistrate Judge Gail Standish from the Central District of California dismissed a copyright infringement suit made by Jesse Braham against music powerhouse Taylor Swift. Braham claimed that the lyric in Swift’s song “Shake It Off,”…
Merely a few weeks ago we discussed a trademark infringement suit initiated by Adidas against Forever 21. Forever 21 had allegedly copied Adidas’s famous three-stripe trademark. The infamous fast fashion company is now in trouble with a brand that many…
The past year has shown that for many female celebrities, privacy in their personal photos and videos might be one of the few luxuries that they cannot afford. In late August of last year, hundreds of nude images of alleged…
Two massive giants in tech, Google, Inc. (“Google”) and Oracle America, Inc. (“Oracle”), have been duking it out on different judicial stages. The fight is over Google’s use of Java API packages in the creation of the Android operating system. The…
Samsung has come under fire more than once in recent weeks. In one incident, owners of its Smart TVs have been complaining that Samsung is inserting Pepsi ads during the playback of their own locally stored movies. Samsung initially tried…
Dr. Hideo Kodama developed the first three-dimensional printing technology, called Rapid Prototyping (“RP”), in 1980. Kodama developed his RP technology for creating industrial prototypes. Kodama unfortunately failed to file the full patent specification before the one-year deadline. Six years later,…
“Better safe than sorry right. Channel 13 news was just talking about this change in Facebook’s privacy policy. Better safe than sorry. As of January 3rd, 2015 at 11:43am Easter standard time. I do not give Facebook or any entities…
Francesca Montalvo is an Associate at the IP law firm of Ladas & Parry. She was editor-in-chief of Volume 32 of the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal. In the year 2012 alone, the U.S. fashion industry generated over $330 billion…
((“Copyright is for losers©™” is attributed to Banksy)) To exist in intellectual property’s “negative space” is characterized as existing in “the territory where IP law might regulate, but (perhaps for accidental or nonessential reasons) does not.” ((Kal Raustiala and Christopher…
