Last December, guitar hero Joe Satriani filed a lawsuit against the members of Coldplay and Capitol Records, alleging the band’s song, “Viva La Vida,” contained “substantial, original portions” of his 2004 track “If I Could Fly.”1 (Listen here to refresh your memory.) To the delight of many Coldplay fans, a financial settlement was finally reached [...]
September seemed like a good month for Tiger Woods. Forbes magazine declared that Woods was “the first billion-dollar athlete.”1 The magazine calculated that with the $10 million bonus he received from the FedEx Cup,2 Woods reached the billionaire status that is usually reserved for the Waltons and hedge fund CEOs. What made Woods’ impressive earnings [...]
A suit over socialite Paris Hilton’s trademarked phrase “That’s Hot” reached its way up to the 9th Circuit. Hallmark depicted the heiress as a waitress, warning a customer as she served him his food, “Don’t touch that”. . . “That’s hot.” She asserts claims of invasion of privacy and misappropriation, among others, for the [...]
All of us have guiltily snuck in a quick visit to sites like Perez Hilton, a pleasure that some of us freely admit to.
Why do we indulge ourselves? We may have different motives. For some, it makes us feel better about ourselves, while others get satisfaction seeing the rich and famous go out without [...]
by Kate DiGeronimo
The 2008 Presidential Election utilized the breadth of the Internet in ways previously unseen. As a new public commons, the Internet was the medium through which many Americans gathered information in making decisions about who to vote for on Election Day. Politicians realized that the Internet was to have a significant [...]
By Dave McCune
This January the fight against online piracy got a little more difficult with a ruling from a district judge in Virginia that the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) reasoning in asking for restitution is “unsound.” As such, the court’s ruling has torn apart the RIAA’s and the Motion Picture Association of America’s [...]