Owners, Borrowers & Thieves 2.0 : Owners, Borrowers & Thieves 2.0 : Husch Blackwell Sanders LLP : First Amendment, Commercial Speech

Sunday night, my multiverse collapsed upon itself. The Season Six premiere of Family Guy: Blue Harvest has been stalking me all summer.

At Comic-Con International in San Diego, Friday was Star Wars Day and Seth MacFarlane discussed the premiere episode during the Family Guy panel. You may have noticed sketches of Yoda and an Imperial Stormtrooper (along with tagline “May the Force be With You”) on the menu I used to discuss enforcement practices. Two weeks later, I was at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco attending the Intellectual Property Law Section’s activities. While there, I had the opportunity to hear David Anderman Senior Director of Business Affairs (and lead attorney) for Lucasfilm Ltd. speak on a panel entitled “‘The Whole World is Watching!’ Privacy, Copyright and Parental Control in the Age of YouTube, MySpace and Beyond,” sponsored by the Forum on Entertainment and Sports Industries. During Anderman’s portion of the panel he discussed the Lucasfilm approach to enforcement and the Family Guy premier. Anderman explained how Lucasfilm’s relationship with Family Guy exemplifies a realistic approach to enforcement that understands branding and that has evolved with technological changes in content creation and distribution.

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While death has ended James Brown's reign as Hardest Working Man in Show Business, his post-mortem litigation may yet snatch from Elvis the title Hardest Work Corpse in Lawsuits.  His latest appearance was in the Illinois Appellate Court, where he was the headliner in the appeal of a right-of-publicity claim against a company that licenses copyrights for stock photographs.  The case presents an intriguing and somewhat confusing fair-use struggle along the border between right of publicity and copyright law.

The basic facts are straightforward: The main defendant, Corbis Corp., licenses the use of stock photographs and images. Its customers range from newspapers and magazines to advertising agencies.  It had, for example, given Rolling Stone Magazine a license to use certain photographs of James Brown in a profile the magazine published under the title Being James Brown.

So far, so good.  Entirely proper, no cause of action.

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