Entertainment and Sports Law

When The Burial, a film inspired by a real-life court case was released in theaters briefly before moving to Amazon Prime Video in 2023, the reviews were mostly positive. A few of those reviews singled out the performance of Mamoudou Athie as junior counsel Hal Dockins. The real-life Dockins, however, was not as happy with the portrayal of himself in the film. He is suing the producers over alleged unauthorized use of his name, image and likeness.

In 1997, Supertramp members Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, the band’s main songwriters, agreed to share their songwriting and publishing income with the group’s three other members — John Helliwell, Robert Siebenberg and Douglas Thomson — and their personal manager David Margereson. But there was one key point missing in the participation memorandum: The agreement didn’t state how long it would remain in effect. It wasn’t until August 2025 that the issue was decided, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

How are copyright holders to prove their works were used to train AI models if the details about the vast data sets used for such training are kept secret? That dilemma surfaced when a California federal judge recently dismissed a claim of direct infringement raised by a group of authors.

A look at moves among attorneys, law firms, companies and other players in entertainment law.

The Nashville federal court where the lawsuit was filed summarized the litigation as “concern[ing] the rights to a prolific composer’s music, a dizzying estate plan, and two descendants at odds over how to manage the royalties those compositions earn.”

What started off as a law directed at Blockbuster video rentals is now being deployed against the New England Patriots, part of a broader privacy trend that will increasingly impact a sports industry eager to embrace advanced technologies that exploit fan and athlete data. A class action filed against the NFL team alleged the storied franchise ran afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act by sharing the personal information of fans who used the team’s app.

After an ongoing battle to gain proceeds from a major sale of The Notorious B.I.G.’s music catalog, a lawsuit from his mother’s estate makes perfectly clear what it wants from his widow Faith Evans: More money, fewer problems.

Notable recent court filings in entertainment law.