The law of copyright is relevant to anyone who is a creator or user of creative works. Traditional copyright rules have been challenged by the evolution of the Internet and social media, which render simple and universal the copying, dissemination and alteration of creative works. Interpreting these rules in today’s digital environment – and, in appropriate cases, bringing creative legal challenges to them – is at the heart of the firm’s practice.
Representative Matters
- Representing religious television producers and syndicators before the Copyright Royalty Board of the Library of Congress in contested proceedings to determine the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual cable and satellite royalties
- Representing program producers, TV stations and documentary filmmakers in connection with all television retransmission proceedings dating back to 1978 and the allocation of billions of dollars of compulsory royalties collected by the Copyright Office
- Enforcing the rights of freelance photographers, informally and through litigation, against online infringements of their images
- Utilizing Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to effect the takedown of infringing material on the Internet and educating clients as to the safe harbor provisions of the law for service providers
- Using copyright law to combat anonymous online defamation, employing a little-used provision of the DMCA to subpoena information from a global service provider to pinpoint the offender
- Advising an association of educators on copyright issues in the classroom and answering complicated fair use questions
- Protecting a nonprofit religious entity’s copyrights in federal bankruptcy court
- Representing a multi-media production company in a copyright and breach of contract suit against the Army contractor that exploited its work product without compensation
- Advancing in federal court a designer’s rights in her jewelry against a world-famous fashion designer
- Representing a satellite resale carrier in landmark litigation that established the cable industry’s right to deliver superstation programming to millions of cable subscribers
- Serving as lead counsel for a consortium of national library associations in connection with passage of the DMCA, the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) and the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH Act)
- Filing numerous amici briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeal on behalf of national library and educational associations concerning provisions of copyright law that govern copyright term and the rights of freelance authors, photographers and publishers to control the electronic republication of works and on behalf of economics professors in a peer-to-peer file-sharing case