LJN Newsletters

For nearly 150 years, clients' opinions about their lawyers have been relegated to word of mouth. Information passed on in this manner is not recorded in any organized way and is therefore not available to the general public. In that time, the only organized source of information about lawyers came from lawyers themselves. All of that is now changing in a rapid, dramatic and explosive fashion, opening new channels and communities of information for legal services consumers, and creating exciting marketing and business development opportunities for lawyers and law firms.

The Web may not be truly worldwide, but it is getting fairly close, and while this has created enormous opportunities, it is not without its challenges. Among the thorniest of these have been issues of jurisdiction, which have been a staple of Web jurisprudence since the earliest days of e-commerce (and even before that). This has only gotten more complex as Web business models have diversified: A modern Web site for a company based in Chicago might be designed in New York, coded in California, supported in India, connected via a Virginia Internet service provider and hosted on servers in the Bahamas (offshore hosting being more and more common for both cost and privacy reasons). More importantly, the company might reasonably expect that site to be viewed by users from Brooklyn to Beijing, and perhaps to be subject to the laws of every jurisdiction in the world.

Copyright Infringement/Rule 12(b)(6) Motion
Record Labels and Their Lawyers/Malicious Prosecution
Songwriter Royalties/State Levy Statute
Video Games/ Celebrity Trademarks
UPCOMING EVENT: SXSW Music Conference 2008 CLE Program

TALENT AGENCIES ACT/SEVERABILITY DOCTRINE
VIDEO GAMES/ARTISTS' INDICIA

The U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Federal Arbitration Act the California Talent Agencies Act for purposes of sending a dispute between a TV personality and his personal manager to an arbitrator per an arbitration clause in the management contract.

The Court of Appeal of California, Second District, decided that any interests in Superman copyrights or termination rights held by Laura Siegel Larson, daughter of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, were her separate property, rather than community property of her marriage.

As a child, Geoffrey Gerber grabbed comic books out of his dentist's treat bag after checkups. As an intellectual-property partner at Husch Blackwell Sanders, he grabs comic books ' key elements now in a substantial portion of his practice ' out of his litigator's case. 'There's a tremendous amount of comic-book litigation out there,' says Gerber, who practices in St. Louis for the newly merged firm. He adds that comic books, which hit it big in the 1930s as mainstream media, are 'fairly new media' in the scope of entertainment.

West Palm Beach, FL, resident Derrick Rahming dreamed of making it big with the hip-hop band Afro Rican and even formed a production company in the mid-1990s. These days millions have heard Rahming's group, even if they don't know it. A sample of his song 'Give It All You Got' jump-starts mega-star Fergie's hit 'Fergalicious' from her album The Duchess. Rahming recently filed a copyright-infringement suit, alleging he wrote the intro to the Billboard pop-chart topper in the late 1980s. He registered it with the U.S. Copyright Office and recorded it in its most popular form in 1995.