Immediate recognition is the epitome of success for musical artists. Few artists attain the level of success at which fans easily identify
their sound from a mere snippet of a track, joining the ranks of artists like Frank Sinatra, Dolly Parton, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Ella Fitzgerald. Their unique sounds are almost immediately recognizable and easily distinguished from other artists in their genres. In the modern rap and pop world, Pitbull has attained this level of notoriety.
Our Fall 2019 issue, Volume 9, Issue 1, includes an exciting and rich collection of works that spans an unusually broad, yet timely and relevant, variety of topics in the areas of IP and entertainment law and policy.
This Article addresses the black market for college athlete services that results from the NCAA’s restrictions on athlete compensation based on the purported need to preserve amateurism. Specifically, this Article focuses on the NCAA’s name, image, and likeness (NIL) restrictions that prevent college athletes from making use of their own reputations for commercial purpose.
It’s the policy of an increasing number of news outlets to retain ownership of the professional
social media accounts of their reporters. In the first case of its kind in the United States, one media company took a former employee to court over the question of ownership.
This Article explores the law and economics of “literary fan art”—unauthorized derivative works by third parties that are based on someone else’s literary work product. What is the legal status of such fan art?
Since 1996, the annual spending on drugs per capita in the U.S. has been the highest among all the developed countries. In 2017, the number reached $1220 per person in the U.S., making the U.S. pharmaceutical industry a $400 billion market. One of the fastest growing segments of the pharmaceutical industry is biologic drugs, accounting for almost 40% of the U.S. prescription drug spending in 2015.
Blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts—these obscure terms began flooding the news a few years ago and for good reason. These are technologies with the potential to fundamentally change the way in which society performs its business transactions.
This spring, JIPEL is proud to present our readers with five cutting edge pieces. From ongoing litigation challenging our intellectual property laws, to cutting edge technology doing the same, our Spring Edition covers both the forefront of the law and the forefront of human innovation challenging.
The Lanham Act sets forth which trademarks may be registered at the Patent and Trademark Office. It contains a number of limitations on registrability. Section 2(a) prohibits among other things the registration of a mark that “[c]onsists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” This provision originally came into force in 1946 with the enactment of the Lanham Act, but the prohibitions it sets forth have been in effect since the late nineteenth century, when the federal government first began to register trademarks.
Two recent decisions from the Federal Circuit in the long-running litigation between Oracle and Google have upended the scope of copyright protection afforded to software. In both decisions, the court weighed in heavily on the side of strong copyright protection, even protecting the relatively functional code comprising application programming interfaces (APIs).