In this seminar from a meeting of the American Bar Association in 2007, panelists Milton Williams, Nicholas Valner, Sandra A. Cranshaw-Sparks, and Stan Soocher conduct a review of a number of recent landmark cases in the field of entertainment law. Among the suits under discussion are: copyright infringement suits brought by the screenwriters of the film Dodgeball; a brief review of copyright cases against internet companies in order to identify the current meaning of “fair use” as applied to internet-distributed materials and parodies; suits against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, the estate of Marilyn Monroe, the estate of Bob Marley and others which explore different sides of contract rights, theft of intellectual property, and celebrity image use rights; the ongoing set of lawsuits by Apple Records against Apple Computer; the lawsuit brought by the band Hawthorne Heights against their label; and more.

In this segment from an ABA 2007 Forum titled “Entertainment Law Litigation Review,” the panelists discuss the “Hawthorne Heights” case, in which the band Hawthorne Heights attempted to argue that their recording contract with their label, Victory Records, was not exclusive and they were therefore allowed to record for other parties. The decision reveals the importance of writing clear and explicit language into contracts, in order to forestall ugly disputes over exactly what the words on the page mean.

In this segment from an ABA 2007 Forum titled “Entertainment Law Litigation Review,” the panelists discuss some recent copyright cases brought against internet companies, and use the cases as a way to identify how “fair use” currently applies to internet-distributed materials, works of parody, and adaptations of photographs.

In this segment from an ABA 2007 Forum titled “Entertainment Law Litigation Review,” the panelists discuss a recent copyright case regarding the limits of fair use when adapting a copyrighted photograph for use in your own work.

In this segment from an ABA 2007 Forum titled “Entertainment Law Litigation Review,” the panelists explain and discuss how the “right of publicity” for a performer’s image and legacy work in practice. They discuss in specific the battle over the will and postmortem rights of publicity for Marilyn Monroe, which have passed from hand to hand in a particularly confusing and controversial fashion since the icon’s 1962 death, and a case involving Patti Duke in which she sued a theater who dropped her from a cast for reasons the court found to be spurious but used her name to gain publicity.