Generic Fair Use

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Tag: prince

Prince spooks YouTube over Copyright Infringement (again)

… and your own concert video recordings on YouTube could be infringing, too

Prince has been gone for nearly four years. But his presence still looms large over copyright law. Even in death, Prince’s estate continues to keep a watchful eye over potential infringers of his musical works.[1] The latest dispute is a potentially haunting restriction of a popular feature on YouTube: people posting video clips of live performances. On January 6, 2020, the federal district court in Massachusetts determined that Prince’s estate has the sole right to distribute video clips of his live performances and that uploading certain song clips to a YouTube channel may even constitute copyright infringement.[2]

This case presents a multitude of legal issues to assess. Additionally, this ruling leaves a potential to a technology-based philosophical conundrum for future copyright cases as they intersect with YouTube style sites. I have a YouTube channel. On this channel I have posted covers of songs that I play on guitar. My videos are nothing fancy, but this recent case and others like it have determined that these videos can actually be infringing works. This article will try to address these legal landmines while exploring any possibility for copyright law as it exists today to be reconciled with how these personal camera-phone videos are treated by the law.

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The Super Bowl of Unauthorized Celebrity Exploitation

Last night, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots to win Super Bowl LII®. By this point, the Super Bowl is more than just a football game. It is a literal spectacle, above and beyond the athletic competition itself. Not only do viewers get exposed to the glitz and glamour of the biggest game of the season, but there is also an extra-long halftime special. Not to mention the heavily-discussed commercials. Often, marketing firms will hire celebrities to appear in these commercials to add a little extra pizzazz. Of course, these celebrities usually agree to appear in these advertisements beforehand, with full knowledge that their likeness is being used for commercial gain. This year’s Super Bowl went a step further.

Prince, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kurt Cobain are some of the most iconic individuals in American history and pop culture. They were also fiercely protective of how their names and images were used when they were alive. Today, their respective estates or other third-parties control how their “publicity rights” and how their likenesses are marketed. Yet somehow each of these three were all featured in different ways during the Super Bowl telecast, often in direct contrast to how they would have presented themselves during their lifetimes. How is this legal? I will try to address this interesting cross-section of trademark, copyright, and publicity right issues here.

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