When does a musician not own their music?
My reflections from Week 2 of the CopyrightX programme at Harvard Law School. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) was a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist, whose piano concertos (such as this one) I really enjoy, and often listened to while studying in law school. Shostakovich
From Stockholm to Stock Market: Sweden’s Spotify set to list on NYSE
Music streaming giant Spotify recently filed its application to put shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The 264 page document details the company's key risks and challenges: I've read them so you don't have to! The Securities Exchange Act of 1933, often called the Truth
Lawyerpalooza: when music festivals get intellectual property licensing wrong
Commercialisation is the process of bringing Intellectual Property (IP) to the market in order to be exploited: put simply, it's how artists make money from their creations. To maintain control and balance risk against rewards, creators often use license agreements to ensure their work is
All the Stars and Constellations
A music video for the new Black Panther film features scenes of striking similarity to artist Lina Iris Viktor's Constellations series. Is this inspiration or infringement? Marvel Studios’ new movie Black Panther features the first black superhero to appear in mainstream comics. It has received widespread acclaim and press,
A Soundtrack for Data Security
So much of the explosion in innovation in the music industry is around technological processes. But artists still need to focus on their art. To do so, they need to surround themselves with tech-savvy people. And hire a good lawyer. – Gigi Johnson, Director of the Center for Music Innovation, University of California Los AngelesPrivacy policies are painful to read, not least because they're very technical, boring, and long. According to a recent study, if the average person read every privacy policy for each website they visited in a given year, it would take approximately 244 hours, or 40 minutes each and every day. In spite of this, privacy policies have begun to attract mainstream attention.