In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s case Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (which we wrote about here), the parties reached a historic settlement. It aims to distribute $1.5 billion among authors and publishers whose pirated works were used to train Anthropic’s large language model called Claude. The datasets made from the…
Isaac Hayes Enterprises v. Trump is a copyright infringement case in the Northern District of Georgia that was allowed to proceed, in part, against defendant Donald J. Trump — but claims against a political action committee called Turning Point Action (“TPA”) were dismissed. Isaac Hayes Enterprises is the entity that manages the rights of legendary singer,…
An employer sued a former employee and his new employer in North Carolina state court over allegedly divulging trade secrets in Atkore v. Keith D. Dinkheller et al.. Late last year, the defendants brought a motion to dismiss all counts in Atkore’s complaint, obtaining a somewhat surprising result. Mr. Dinkheller had worked in numerous leadership…
As one of my attorney mentors once said, mistakes can happen – it’s what you do upon learning of the mistake that counts. In Barbera v. Grailed, LLC, plaintiff photographer was sanctioned for failing to comply with discovery in the Southern District of New York. The picture in question was of Jonah Hill that was…
Kohls v. Ellison is an ongoing case in the U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota concerning the state’s anti-digital manipulation law (Minn. Stat. 609.771), which prohibits the use of so-called deepfakes in political campaigning. Deep fakes are digitally manipulated videos, pictures, or audio that generally make people appear to be doing something that never happened. …
The Second Circuit reversed a district court opinion that cited the plaintiff’s history as an active litigant as a reason to side step the Second Circuit’s discovery rule in Michael Grecco Productions v. RADesign et al. Grecco is an accomplished photographer who has enforced his rights prolifically in federal courts. In copyright infringement cases, the…
In X Corp v. Bright Data LTD, X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, sought to put an end to the practice of “scraping” by a company called Bright Data. (A scraper requests and retrieves information without manually browsing pages, often for tailored reasons.) The Northern District of California dismissed the case, finding that X failed…
In Thumbtack v. Liaison, plaintiff sued for copyright infringement and trade dress infringement for allegedly copying its website. The Northern District of California granted in part the motion to dismiss, because many of the plaintiff’s claims were too vague to address. The court pointed to things in Thumbtack’s exhibits, like circling part of an exhibit without…
Richardson vs. Kharbouch, brought in the Northern District of Illinois, was an infringement case that illustrated the dangers of doing copyright work on a shoestring. The plaintiff, Eddie Lee Richardson, also known as Hotwire the Producer, sued Karim Kharbouch, also known as French Montana. According to plaintiff/Richardson/Hotwire, he came up with a song when he was just…
I was a full-time musician before law school, but Standing on the Horizon is the first album as a band leader (playing tenor sax, soprano sax and bass clarinet) consisting of my own compositions played with four extraordinary, Grammy-nominated and award-winning musicians. In early October 2023, the album was released on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and…
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