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IP · PRACTICE DESK

Intellectual Property & Media

License architecture, personality rights, and platform takedown procedure — how rights in content, names, and likenesses are granted, monetized, and enforced.

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IP-01 · 01

Intellectual Property License Agreements: Scope, Exclusivity, Royalties, and Termination

9 MIN · IP

A license is four separate decisions wearing one sentence. This brief takes apart the grant clause, then follows the money through royalty definitions, audits, and the end of the term.

  • The grant clause sets four independent levers — field of use, territory, term, and exclusivity — and each should be drafted separately.
  • Exclusivity means whatever the contract says; a licensor that fails to exclude itself has granted a sole license, not an exclusive one.
  • Royalty disputes almost always turn on the definition of net sales and on deductions, not on the headline percentage rate.
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IP-02 · 02

Right of Publicity: Commercial Use of Name, Image, Voice, and Likeness

9 MIN · IP

There is no national right of publicity. This brief explains what each state protects, how expressive-use defenses are tested, and how voice and synthetic-media statutes changed the analysis.

  • The right of publicity is state law; scope, duration, registration, and defenses differ enough that no single national clearance rule works.
  • Post-mortem protection ranges from none in some states to decades or a century in others, and some require registration to preserve it.
  • Tennessee's ELVIS Act, enacted in 2024, expressly extended the state's publicity statute to voice and to tools producing unauthorized simulations.
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IP-03 · 03

DMCA Takedown and Counter-Notice Procedures for Online Content

9 MIN · IP

Section 512 gives copyright owners a fast removal route and gives accused users a statutory answer. This brief maps both filings, their clocks, and the liability each one creates.

  • A takedown notice must carry six statutory elements; only the authorization statement is sworn under penalty of perjury, not the infringement claim itself.
  • A counter-notice does not decide who owns anything. It restarts a clock and forces the sender to sue or let the material return.
  • Storage providers that follow the statute restore contested material not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days after a valid counter-notice.
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IP-04 · 04

Challenging a Patent: Inter Partes Review and PTAB Practice

8 MIN · IP

Inter partes review is a narrow, fast, expensive way to kill patent claims — and it closes doors permanently. This brief maps the timing gates, the grounds limit, and the estoppel that follows a final written decision.

  • An inter partes review petition may generally be filed once nine months have passed since the patent issued or was reissued.
  • Grounds are limited to anticipation and obviousness, and only on prior art consisting of patents and printed publications.
  • Service of an infringement complaint starts a one-year clock; after it runs, 35 U.S.C. 315(b) bars the petition entirely.
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IP-05 · 05

Cease-and-Desist Letters: Strategy, Risk, and Declaratory Judgment

8 MIN · IP

A demand letter is not a warning shot. It can create federal jurisdiction for the recipient, start damages clocks, and trigger preservation duties on both sides at once.

  • A letter that creates a substantial, immediate controversy can give the recipient standing to sue first, in a forum of its choosing.
  • Wording controls that risk: identifying a patent, a product, and a demand moves a letter toward jurisdiction; an open licensing enquiry moves away.
  • Sending or receiving a demand triggers preservation duties, so routine deletion has to stop before anyone drafts a reply.
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IP-06 · 06

Copyright Termination Rights: Recapturing Transferred Rights

10 MIN · IP

Federal law lets an author undo a copyright grant decades after signing it, regardless of what the contract says. The right is unwaivable, but it is also unforgiving about arithmetic and paperwork.

  • A grant an author made on or after 1 January 1978 can be terminated during a five-year window opening 35 years after execution.
  • Notice must be served at least two and no more than ten years before the chosen effective date, and recorded before that date.
  • Works made for hire cannot be terminated at all, which makes the hire question the first thing to answer, not the last.
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IP-07 · 07

Music and Podcast Licensing: Which Rights You Actually Need

8 MIN · IP

Almost every music clearance failure comes from clearing one copyright and forgetting the other. This brief separates the composition from the recording and matches each use to the licences it needs.

  • Music carries two separate copyrights: the underlying composition and the specific sound recording, usually owned by different people.
  • Audiovisual use needs a synchronisation licence for the composition and a master use licence for the recording, negotiated separately.
  • Podcasts have no blanket or compulsory route for music; direct licences or production-library music are the workable options.
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IP-08 · 08

Advertising Claims: Substantiation and False Advertising Exposure

10 MIN · IP

Two systems police advertising claims at once: an agency that asks whether you had proof before you spoke, and competitors who can sue you for the sales you took.

  • The FTC requires a reasonable basis for an objective claim before it is disseminated, not assembled afterwards in response to an inquiry.
  • The claim being tested is what consumers reasonably take away, including implied messages, not the literal words the advertiser chose.
  • Lanham Act 43(a) lets a competitor sue over false or misleading commercial advertising and recover damages, profits, and sometimes fees.
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IP-09 · 09

Fair Use in Commercial Content: Applying the Four Factors

10 MIN · IP

Fair use is a defence decided case by case, not a rule with safe amounts. This brief works through the four statutory factors as a commercial publisher has to apply them.

  • Section 107 lists four factors and no safe harbours; there is no percentage, word count, or number of seconds that is automatically fair.
  • The first factor asks whether the new use has a genuinely different purpose, weighed against its commercial character as a matter of degree.
  • In 2023 the Supreme Court's Warhol decision tightened that analysis where a secondary use substitutes for the original's own licensing market.
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IP-10 · 10

Patent Marking, Virtual Marking, and the Damages Consequence

9 MIN · IP

Marking is a housekeeping task with a seven-figure consequence. Without it, a patentee's damages often start at the demand letter or the complaint rather than at first infringement.

  • Where a patented product is sold, marking is a precondition to recovering damages for infringement occurring before actual notice was given.
  • Virtual marking is permitted: the word patent plus a web address that associates the article with the relevant patent numbers.
  • Claims to a method alone carry no marking duty, because there is no article to mark; mixed patents follow what is asserted and sold.
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Scope

Questions this desk answers

  • What exactly does this license grant?
  • Can this use of a likeness be sold?
  • How does a takedown and counter-notice work?
  • Where do license and IP ownership diverge?
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