Year: 2019

History circa 2012:   The long awaited prequel to The Lord of the Rings is about to appear at a luxury movie theater near you, where you can lounge on heated leather seats and eats tiny morsels of crab for second breakfast as long as you are careful not to spill any...

This is a tale with a simple premise. You and a friend decide to collaborate on a screenplay. He’s got a great idea for Godzilla meets Colossus meets Gigantor meets angry mythological Greek from Wrath of the Titans, and you’ve got massive writing chops, as evidenced...

It is undisputed that Bogart liked his Burberry trenchcoat. No, wait, I take that back. He loved his Burberry trenchcoat. In fact, he loved it so much that he actually wore the same coat in the two films that still serve as templates for how to bring hardboiled...

Those of you who watch Hulu on a regular basis will have noticed the ubiquitous advertising that is increasingly crowded into all the popular shows. From two or perhaps three 30-second advertisements when Hulu debuted, viewers are now subjected to five or six...

I remember back in 1991 I was reading American Psycho, the Bret Easton Ellis novel about the yuppie serial killer and sexual sadist who was also fixated on material luxury items – Hermes ties, Bruno Magli shoes, Corneliani suits, cashmere gloves and other fetishistic...

When Larry Lessig came up with the idea for the Creative Commons, he intended to create an alternative licensing system that would solve copyright registration problems in the United States. While admirable, the idea in many respects serves to enshrine the current...

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court heard the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., which involves the application of the copyright laws to the time-honored American tradition of buying cheap and selling dear. The facts in Kirtsaeng were...

Barbie is, of course, an American icon known to virtually every man, woman and child in the United States. Even if you are a man (and played with G.I. Joe as a boy), your sisters played with Barbies, or your cousins did, or the girls down the street had tea parties...

On a sunny Thursday afternoon my cohorts prodded me out of a haze of pre-trial preparation and induced me to slay some urban legends about copyright. Though most of this information is available elsewhere, this is a simple primer for anyone who wants to learn the...