Meaghan H. Kent

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The perfect addition to any project is music. Whether you are making a video advertisement for your product; including music in your posts on your company website, TikTok, or YouTube; posting an at-home workout video for your clients; using music at corporate events; or playing music at your bar or restaurant – music is a vital part of society. Music is also the most common reason your content may be muted or taken down from social media, in addition to being exposed to potential liability for copyright infringement and related monetary damages. When you use someone’s music without their permission, absent a few extremely limited exceptions, you are infringing on their copyright.1

For the vast majority of music uses, you will first need to obtain permission. In this article, we lay out some fundamentals to assist in determining the type of license an average company would need and some potential alternatives. Bottom line: when you are planning and budgeting for music in a project, make sure you get the proper rights and permissions in place before pressing “Play.”…

Continue Reading Conducting Your Way Through Music Licensing: The Most Common Issues

Supermodel Jelena Noura “Gigi” Hadid was not the first celebrity to be photographed by paparazzi and then to post the resulting photo to social media, nor was she the first to be subsequently sued for copyright infringement for doing so. Other celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez and, most recently, Victoria Beckham, have made news for the same situation.

This trend falls into an interesting intersection of two significant tenets of law: a celebrity’s right of publicity in their own image and a photographer’s right to copyright their artistic work. The district court dismissed the case due to a lack of a copyright registration. In addition to that defense, though, her attorneys also raised the defenses of fair use and implied license. The second may have begun paving the way for future legal challenges to clarify these issues by raising a novel argument—implied license—alongside the more typical defense of fair use.…

Continue Reading #StrikeAPose #CopyrightInfringement