Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

Moneyball's Impact On Business And Sports, Jeffrey S. Moorad, Billy Beane, Omar Minaya, Phil Griffin

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

The article presents a transcript of the "'Moneyball's' Impact on Business and Sports" panel discussion which was held as part of the annual Villanova Sports and Entertainment Law Journal Symposium in Villanova, Pennsylvania in February 2012. The panel, which featured former Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell and Oakland Athletics baseball team General Manager Billy Beane, discussed the impact of Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" on the game of baseball.

Legal Writing, The Remix: Plagiarism And Hip Hop Ethics, 63 Mercer L. Rev. 597 (2012), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I focus on hip hop music and culture as an access point to teach first-year law students about the academic and professional pitfalls of plagiarism. Hip hop provides a good model for comparison because most entering students are immersed in a popular culture that is saturated with allusions to hip hop. As a point of reference for incoming law students, hip hop possesses a valuable currency as it represents something real, experienced, and relatable.

Significant parallels exist between the cultures of United States legal writing and hip hop, although attempting direct analogies would be absurd. Chief among …

Copyright's Creative Hierarchy In The Performing Arts, Michael W. Carroll

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Copyright law grants authors certain rights of creative control over their works. This Article argues that these rights of creative control are too strong when applied to the performing arts because they fail to take account of the mutual dependence between writers and performers to fully realize the work in performance. This failure is particularly problematic in cases in which the author of a source work, such as a play or a choreographic work, imposes content-based restrictions on how a third party may render the work in performance. This Article then explores how Congress might craft a statutory license to …

Wisconsin Legislature Employs Halftime Adjustment: How Wisconsin's "New" Indian Mascot Law Changes The Outlook For Future Challenges To The Use Of Discriminatory Nicknames, Mascots, And Logos In Wisconsin Schools, Jeremy Daniel Heacox

Marquette Sports Law Review

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The Wrath Of The Blizz King: How The Ninth Circuit’S Decision In Mdy Industries, Inc. V. Blizzard Entertainment May Slay The Game Genie, Alessandra Garbagnati

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Since its release in 2004, Blizzard Entertainment's ("Blizzard") World of Warcraft ("WoW") has become the world's most infamous and popular massively multiplayer online role playing game. The company's strong anticheating policy culminated in the Ninth Circuit's decision in MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment, where the court held that the rights holders could use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") to prevent circumvention even where there is no actual copyright infringement involved. Although cheaters are not a sympathetic group of people, the Ninth Circuit's decision strays from similar decisions by other circuit courts and potentially grants rights holders like Blizzard the …

Fighting The First Sale Doctrine: Strategies For A Struggling Film Industry, Sage Vanden Heuvel

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, grants the owners of a copy of a copyrighted work the right to sell, rent, or lease that copy without permission from the copyright owner. This doctrine, first endorsed by the Supreme Court in Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, was established at a time when the owner of a good necessarily had to forego possession in order to sell or lease the item to another.[...] The changes in technology and industry over the past two decades threaten to upend this balance. In today's digital world, an owner of a copy of …

How The Traditional Property Rights Model Informs The Television Broadcasting Spectrum Rationalization Challenge, J. Armand Musey

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

This paper examines the role zoning rights and eminent domain may play in the Federal Communication Commission's ("FCC") challenge of reallocating underutilized television broadcast spectrum for use in significantly higher value mobile broadband applications. The government must find a way to reallocate the spectrum in an economically and legally efficient manner, balancing the interests of the politically powerful broadcasters and those of society as a whole. From a strictly legal perspective, the broadcasters have a relatively weak claim to property rights. However, the government has indicated it seeks an incentivized voluntary return of spectrum by the broadcasters, suggesting the government …

The Transformative Tribute: How Mash-Up Music Constitutes Fair Use Of Copyrights, Vera Golosker

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

The music industry faces copyright protection issues in light of the transformative digital sampling trend, which has carved out a new genre: mash-up. Without obtaining licensing agreements, creators of mash-up music use parts of copyrighted songs as the ingredients for a fusion of sounds that arguably amounts to more creative value than the sum of its parts. In confronting the legality of mash-up music, courts and legislators must strike a balance between securing original artists' interest and promoting new frontiers of expression. This article presents a background of digital sampling, applies the fair use defense to mash-up music, and proposes …

Online Business Reviews And The Public Figure Doctrine: An Advertising-Based Standard, Jenna Morton

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Online reviews exert a powerful influence of consumers, who rely on the reviews to choose restaurants, barbers, doctors, and many other businesses. Businesses also rely on the reviews as an important form of advertisement. False reviews thus harm both businesses and consumers. Businesses that are harmed by false online reviews can bring a defamation action against the reviewer. However, the current legal standard is unclear as applied to businesses, as it looks to whether an individual is a "public figure." This note weighs the costs and benefits of three possible legal standards for businesses bringing defamation actions: (1) a bright …

Of Guilds And Men: Copyright Workarounds In The Cinematographic Industry, Adriane Porcin

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

The motion picture industry utilizes a varied collection of more or less formal mechanisms for dealing with the collective nature of audiovisual works, ranging from collective bargaining to legal presumptions. What these instances of copyright workarounds have in common is that they are all about circumventing traditional notions of authorship (the right to be deemed the author of a work) and ownership (the right to exert control over a work). When considered from an international perspective, the cinematographic industry is fertile ground for an exploration of such mechanisms.

After a recitation of the Berne Convention, this paper will proceed to …

Crowdsourcing A Trademark: What The Public Giveth, The Courts May Taketh Away, Llewellyn Joseph Gibbons

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

There is a long tradition of trademark holders relying on the public to create designations that they then adopt as a trademark. Historically, this has been a long and slow process. Acquiring secondary meaning from the individual's first use of the designation could take years. Web 2.0 and other forms of social media have the potential to speed up this process through the use of User Generated Content ("UGC"). Frequently, coined designations are nicknames for well-known brands, so they are potentially quite valuable. Trademark law is ambiguous regarding who owns a designation created by the public, if the individual claiming …

Competitive Entertainment: Implications Of The Nfl Lockout Litigation For Sports, Theatre, Music, And Video Entertainment, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

The 2011 dispute between the National Football League ("NFL" or "League"), representing the football teams, and NFL Players' Association ("NFLPA," or "Players," or "Players Association"), the union representing its football players, oscillated among the collective bargaining table, the National Labor Relations Board ("NLRB"), and the courts. The League preferred labor law as the matrix of the controversy. The Players preferred antitrust law. Ultimately, the union's most powerful weapon was not to withhold player services in a strike, but to challenge various anticompetitive arrangements wanted by the teams under the antitrust laws.

This article begins with a brief review of the …

Games Are Not Coffee Mugs: Games And The Right Of Publicity, 29 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 1 (2012), William K. Ford, Raizel Liebler

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Are games more like coffee mugs, posters, and T-shirts, or are they more like books, magazines, and films? For purposes of the right of publicity, the answer matters. The critical question is whether games should be treated as merchandise or as expression. Three classic judicial decisions, decided in 1967, 1970, and 1973, held that the defendants needed permission to use the plaintiffs' names in their board games. These decisions judicially confirmed that games are merchandise, not something equivalent to more traditional media of expression. As merchandise, games are not like books; instead, they are akin to celebrity-embossed coffee mugs. To …

Settling Cultural Property Disputes, Amy Bitterman

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

The Paper Case: The Neutral Reportage Privilege In Defamation Cases And Its Impact On The First Amendment, Shelly Rosenfeld

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

Penalty On The Field: Creating A Ncaa Sexual Assault Policy, Trisha Ananiades

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

The article discusses a call for the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) creation of a sexual assault policy in the wake of several on-campus incidents involving student-athletes at institutions such as Marquette University, Colorado State University, and Louisiana State University. It states that the NCAA should implement a rule in 2012 which would allow them to revoke the eligibility of any student-athlete who is found to be responsible for committing a sexual assault.

The Twelve-Year-Old Girl's Lawsuit That Changed America: The Continuing Impact Of Now V. Little League Baseball, Inc. At 40, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

In 1972, Little League's national office forced 12-year-old Maria Pepe off her Hoboken (N.J.) team because "[g]irls are not eligible." The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights sustained her gender discrimination claim in 1973, and the courts upheld the administrative decision a year later.

National reaction to Maria Pepe's courageous insistence on gender equity helped sustain the evolution in gender roles that had accelerated since the Women's Movement of the 1960s. Her landmark legal action also likely influenced the Supreme Court's gradual movement toward intermediate scrutiny of gender discrimination claims; the 1975 federal regulations that assured Title IX of the …

We, The Judges: The Legalized Subject And Narratives Of Adjudication In Reality Television, 81 Umkc L. Rev. 1 (2012), Cynthia D. Bond

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

At first a cultural oddity, reality television is now a cultural commonplace. These quasi-documentaries proliferate on a wide range of network and cable channels, proving adaptable to any audience demographic. Across a variety of types of "reality" offerings, narratives of adjudication replete with "judges," "juries," and "verdicts"-abound. Do these judgment formations simply reflect the often competitive structure or subtext of reality TV? Or is there a deeper, more constitutive connection between reality TV as a genre and narratives of law and adjudication? This article looks beyond the many "judge shows" popular on reality TV (e.g., Judge Judy') to examine the …

Player Safety In Youth Sports: Sportsmanship And Respect As An Injury Prevention Strategy, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Preventing avoidable injury is the first obligation of adults who conduct and supervise youth sports events. The law plays only a limited role because lawsuits occur only after the injury. As the behavior of many parents and coaches has deteriorated, national youth sports governing bodies have produced materials that cast adults as role models and urge them to teach and practice sportsmanship and respect. These bodies should now recast these useful citizenship-based adult-education materials to stress also that adherence to sportsmanship and respect helps prevent injuries that can occur when adults acting irresponsibly neutralize national safety standards. Protective equipment is …

The Paradox That Wasn't: Federal Preemption Of State-Law Voice Misappropriation Claims, 11 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 694 (2012), Zachary M. Vaughan

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

There exists in the law of copyright preemption what some have identified as a paradox: that in certain cases involving claims for voice misappropriation in which a plaintiff’s voice has merely been imitated, claims have been allowed to proceed, while other cases that involve actual uses of a plaintiff’s voice—that is, samples from sound recordings—have been held to be preempted by the federal Copyright Act. This article argues that this apparent paradox is actually no conflict at all. After a brief background section, this article collects and explains cases, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of one possible harmonization of the …