An amicus curiae brief filed today on behalf of three former clients whose right to use trademarks for purposes of parody we defended on a number of occasions over the past two decades, urges the Supreme Court to uphold the Rogers v. Grimaldi standard as a screen to weed out weak trademark infringement claims brought […]
Author Archives: Paul Levy
The New York Times reports that Louis Vuitton, perhaps the most notorious trademark bully of them all, used a Joan Mitchell painting in one of its advertisements after her foundation repeatedly refused permission because she had, and it has, a strict policy against commercial use of her work. The Joan Mitchell Foundation has sent a […]
AdLife Marketing and Communications, a company specializing in photographs of food for use in grocery story advertisements, has a sorry history of abusive copyright infringement claims. In 2021, it moved from Rhode Island to Florida, changed its name to Prepared Food Photos, and began to be represented by Florida lawyer Daniel DeSouza, through a firm […]
A disturbing decision from a Texas court of appeals held last year that an anonymous person, who allegedly called several of the advertisers in D Magazine and accused the magazine of being “racist,” and who has been sue for defamation, could not file a motion to dismiss under the Texas anti-SLAPP law contending that the […]
Late last week we filed an amicus brief in an Ohio court case in which the City of Beachwood is financing litigation, purportedly seeking to recover damages for the police chief based on an anonymous email and a handful of anonymous posts to the police department’s Facebook page that denigrated the police chief’s leadership. We […]
The New York Times carries this story about the use of facial recognition technology to bar any lawyers working at firms who handle litigation against MSG Entertainment from attending sporting events, or even holiday shows, at Madison Square Garden. New York’s old law protecting theatre critics from being excluded after they panned a show has […]
by Paul Alan Levy Judge Vincent Chabbria ruled that an anonymous Twitter user using the pseudonym “Mr. Money Bags” could not be identified pursuant to a DMCA subpoena, both because her display of copyrighted photographs to taunt a venture capitalist for allegedly spending money on the company of nubile young women was fair use, and […]
by Paul Alan Levy The effort by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society (a/k/a Jehovah’s Witnesses) to identify a dissident member, "Kevin McFree," through a spurious claim of copyright infringement has ended with a whimper rather than a bang as Watch Tower agreed to dismiss its copyright lawsuit with prejudice to avoid a possible […]
Do Copyright Holders Get a Free Pass to Identify Alleged Infringers? by Paul Alan Levy Suppose that, on June 4, 2022 the owner of a China-based Twitter account were to post this 2005 photo of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, with text calling for remembrance of the martyrs of Tiananmen Square. Suppose further that, […]
by Paul Alan Levy This is a sad tale of hypocrisy on the part of a group whose litigation over the past eighty-five years has set many of our most important First Amendment precedents. But over the past four to five years, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, popularly known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, […]