Richardson vs. Kharbouch, brought in the Northern District of Illinois, was an infringement case that illustrated the dangers of doing copyright work on a shoestring. The plaintiff, Eddie Lee Richardson, also known as Hotwire the Producer, sued Karim Kharbouch, also known as French Montana. According to plaintiff/Richardson/Hotwire, he came up with a song when he was just…
The Larson v. Perry saga essentially ended with the judge’s denying summary judgment to both sides; essentially, “a pox on both your houses.” The background of this case was famously retold in The New York Times Magazine’s “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” I also wrote about it in “Bad Friends, Inspirations, and Betrayals” in…
Lane Coder Photography v. Hearst Corporation is a copyright case from the Southern District of New York …which lost all its steam shortly after it began. The case was brought by a photographer who was hired to take real estate pictures of the Connecticut home of Paul Simon and Edie Brickell. The purpose was to…
*Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 In mid-May, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts, INC. v. Lynn Goldsmith, et al. The Court affirmed a Second Circuit decision, which had reversed a district court decision. For those unfamiliar with the background of this case, we wrote about it…
Just as a song recording has two copyrights, so do comedy performances. Each recorded song and bit has a sound recording right and the rights to the underlying composition. In the Pandora Media case, these underlying rights form the basis for a dispute that would eventually veer into the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, the Sherman Act, and…
On this blog, I typically write about decisions and motions involving third parties. But every once in a while, tooting your own horn is appropriate. Here’s how we won $19 million for our client in January 2022. This case arose out of a construction loan for an historic hotel in Miami. Under the management of…
Some things in life are just unusual, and being a landlord is often the gateway to witnessing a lot of that. A surprising source of compensation for a trashed house might be damages for copyright infringement. Basset v. Jensen et al is a case in which the plaintiff, Leah Bassett, rented her custom-decorated residence to…
USPTO v. Booking.com is an appeal from the USPTO and TTAB’s rejecting registration of the mark BOOKING.COM. As many readers may know — and therein lies the reason for the decision discussed here — Booking.com is an online service that, not surprisingly, facilitates making reservations for flights and hotel rooms. The applicant submitted BOOKING.COM to the…
Lucky Brand Dungarees, Inc., et al. v. Marcel Fashions Group, Inc. is a Supreme Court case centering on the idea of defense preclusion — or, more accurately, avoiding the issue of defense preclusion. In this case, the appellant wanted to argue that Marcel Fashions Group (Marcel) could not raise a defense that it could have raised in one of two…