A court in New York recently allowed a raunchy, one woman show relaying an alternative universe version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" to go on in the face of a copyright claim by the Dr. Suess estate; with the reasoning that the use of the underlying work was "transformative". https://www.courthousenews.com/off-broadway-grinch-parody-defeats-copyright-claims/ The legal ruling is complex, and I will leave it to others to parse its validity; or whether the ruling will s

A photographer recently settled a lawsuit brought by PETA over the copyright ownership of a "selfie" taken by a macaque monkey. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie. While the suit itself was nothing more than a publicity stunt by PETA (let's be clear, as much as I like macaque monkeys, animals do not have legal rights to ownership; just ask estate lawyers that need to dra

Things are changing in entertainment. Everyone knows it. Check out the latest write up in Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/why-hollywood-as-we-know-it-is-already-over. What's a lawyer to do? Big ticket productions meant you could send out big ticket bills. But in a world of smaller productions with smaller budgets and an aggregation of the larger projects into the hands of economically sophisticated entities (e.g. Amazon and Netflix), how will the legio