Susan Kohlmann, managing partner of Jenner & Block's New York office, has secured a shutout win for the stepdaughter of John Steinbeck in the latest installment of a long-running legal feud over book rights that has divided the late author's progeny.
"Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene," said federal Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz in denying an appeal by the movie-filtering service VidAngel to lift an injunction that has kept its technology off the market since December 2016.
The Library of Congress' Copyright Royalty Board, the panel of three judges who set copyright royalty rates and settle related disputes, announced the launch of an electronic filing and case management system in an effort to streamline its manual and cumbersome case management processes.
The Lessons of History
In the context of a copyright case, a defendant's prior bad acts and prior conduct are more useful to a plaintiff than is typical in civil litigation.
The Supreme Court sparked a seismic shift in patent litigation recently when it upset the long-standing interpretation of 28 U.S.C. §1400(b), the special patent venue statute. TC Heartland held that for the purposes of patent venue, the meaning of "resides" in Section 1400(b) is not supplemented by the broad definition of "resides" in the general venue provision, 28 U.S.C. §1391.
Since 2007, the development of the musical has been the source of protracted litigation that reached its latest stage in June 2017.
The Supreme Court let stand a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision that said issuers of takedown notices aren't liable under the DMCA unless they actually knew that the material did not infringe their copyright, or were willfully blind to that knowledge.
'Disparaging' Trademarks Decision
High Court Declines Takedown Notice/Fair Use Case
While copyright registration normally constitutes prima facie evidence of copyright ownership, the court noted that the estate had registered the song copyright 31 years after it was originally published and only in response to the defendants' sampling of the song on Drake's album.
