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A teen beauty who slapped The Walt Disney Co. with a $100 million suit claiming she had been depicted as a bratty child on the reality TV show <i>Wife Swap</i> will not have her day in court. Alicia Guastaferro was 15 when her mother signed a release and waiver for her TV appearance, during which the daughter made the comment that she felt "sorry for people who aren't as gorgeous as me." Even though Guastaferro did not execute the release, Acting New York County Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla nonetheless held that she was bound by its arbitration clause.

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Record labels have taken a lot of heat for being slow learners when it comes to profiting from Internet-era trends like downloads of mobile ringtones, but the labels haven't been shy in one area: copyright litigation against online purveyors of their artists' music. Musicians, meanwhile, have targeted the labels for allegedly stiffing them on royalties when customers pay for their music online.

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Wilmington, DE-based Connolly Bove Lodge &amp; Hutz has ventured into the world of pop culture through its Los Angeles office. Records on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that partner Grant T. Langton is helping Charlie Sheen, the former star of the CBS sitcom <i>Two and a Half Men</i>, with a trademark endeavor. Sheen is trying to trademark 22 catchphrases, as well as his name and signature.

Two artists suing Dreamworks for copying the Kung Fu Panda character and concept. And while history shows that plaintiffs taking on Hollywood with such claims rarely succeed in court, at least some copyright experts believe that one of these cases may be an exception.

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To determine whether a defendant's work is substantially similar to a plaintiff's work in a copyright infringement case, courts generally first discard any unprotectable elements from the plaintiff's work. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York recently ruled that the use of one actor to play multiple roles in the plaintiff's 1949 comedy film <i>Kind Hearts and Coronets</i> wasn't a protectable element for proving infringement by the authors of a stage musical adapted from the film.

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More film productions have become international affairs, with shooting in faraway exotic locations, post-production in still other foreign countries, production funding from international sources, and sales in both foreign and domestic markets. The question then is how best to resolve disputes arising among the vast cast of characters in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Every lawyer in America has heard of the iPad, and there are some surveys that show a significant number of us also own one. There is no question that the iPad's portability is a big advantage, or that the technology behind it is rock solid. The question, up until recently, has been whether or not the iPad is capable of some of the heavy lifting the business of litigation requires. While apps specifically designed for professionals are still somewhat rare, I've found a few that answer the question with a resounding "yes."

The number of matters handled by PBP-ATL has consistently grown over the years. The recent economic slowdown has placed added demands on many of Atlanta's non-profit organizations, and the incoming requests for PBP-ATL's legal services have increased. The troubled economy also caused a reduction in our volunteer numbers, but given the network of dedicated attorneys still capable of volunteering their legal expertise, the rise in requests should have been manageable, at least in theory. The reality however, was quite the contrary.