Insurance Policy Doesn't Cover Artists Suit Against Record Company<br>No Oral Agreement for TV Producer and Distributor to Share Revenue<br>Non-Payment of Foreign Record Royalties Not Enough for Rescission of Entire Contract
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit again threw out a $550,000 fine against CBS Corp. for televising Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.
The year 2013 may be a watershed in the music industry. It is the year that opens a new window in the Copyright Act through which many post-1977 grants of rights under copyright potentially could be terminated.
At the 34th Annual ABA Forum on Franchising, held in Baltimore in October, two veteran franchisee attorneys led a session in which they set forth the basics for protecting franchisees' rights and interests.
A common question that commercial landlords and tenants face is which of them is responsible for a repair to the subject premises. These disputes often center on whether the repair is "structural" or "nonstructural."
The safest approach to obtaining exclusive rights for uses of a copyrighted work is to procure those rights from all of the copyright's owners. Then how "exclusive" is a license that is obtained from one joint owner of a copyright? Litigation in Nevada federal court involving rights on which the highly successful musical Jersey Boys was allegedly based deals with this very question.
Many writers, observers and enthusiasts following this year's professional sports labor disputes in both the NFL and the NBA focused solely on the players, the owners and the fans. But there is another group of stakeholders that is inevitably affected by a lack of labor peace: sponsorship partners.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
While the DOJ Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative is still in its early stages and cybersecurity regulations are evolving, whistleblower plaintiffs have already begun leveraging the FCA to pursue alleged noncompliance with government cybersecurity requirements.
