Intellectual Property Blog

How Athletes Can Protect Their NIL Online

A Practical Guide to Monitoring, Enforcement, and Brand Protection

For today’s athletes, visibility is both an opportunity and a risk. The same platforms that help build a personal brand also make it easy for others to misuse an athlete’s name, image, or likeness for their own gain. Many student‑athletes experience this when they stumble across a fake merch page, an impersonation account, or a video ad using their image without permission.

To respond effectively and quickly athletes need a structured notice‑and‑takedown strategy. Before diving into enforcement, it’s helpful to understand what NIL actually is and why the law treats it differently from other forms of intellectual property. More >

Who Owns the Moment? Rights in Sports Photos and Videos

One of the most addictive parts of sport is its ability to capture our imagination and create enduring memories. If we are lucky, we can capture visual depictions of those moments to relive the memories. Whether we are capturing the experience in person on our cameras or at home and watching the experience on our televisions or through social media, sports memories and video or photographic depictions of those memories go hand-in-hand. For me it was Kirk Gibson rounding the bases after his 1988 game winning homerun and Reggie Miller’s 8 points in 8.9 seconds (a/k/a the night he  directed a choke gesture to Spike Lee). For my son, by far the biggest sports fan I know, it is probably a tie between Omar Cooper’s toe-tap game-winning touchdown over Penn State or the Sports Illustrated cover-worthy diving touchdown by Indiana’s Heisman-winning quarterback that sealed Indiana’s improbable national championship. Many people reading this will know those images. But how? Not everyone watched those games. Those memories were captured and redisplayed. Many people claim rights in those redisplayed memories.   More >

When Art Meets Auto: Daniel Arsham, Quavo, and the Battle Over a Ferrari Sculpture

The intersection of art and intellectual property law is rarely quiet and the recent dispute involving artist Daniel Arsham and rapper Quavo is revving up that conversation in a high-profile way. At the center of the dispute? A clay sculpture of a Ferrari crafted by Arsham and allegedly used without permission by Quavo in a music video and related promotional materials. More >

No, Google, I Don’t Want You to Write My Letter

The 2024 Olympics have come to a close, and as we all look back on the memories made and records set in Paris (and Tahiti, of course!), I can’t help but focus on a commercial that irritated me to no end. The commercial promoted Google’s Gemini AI technology by featuring a proud father working with his impressionable daughter, who the ad tells us was looking up to track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The doting but modest father explains that his daughter “wants to show Sydney some love (by writing a letter), and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right. So Gemini: Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is, and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.” More >

SCOTUS to Public Officials: Private Eyes Are Watching You...Post to Your Social Media

Removing negative comments or blocking someone from your social media page may seem harmless, but if you’re a public official, a new holding from the United States Supreme Court may give you pause about how you use your social media. More >

Are You Sure That’s Free? Content from Others in Your Social Media

Big business owners, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and influencers are all looking for boosts to their reputations that drive traffic and revenue their way. Using the parlance of the 2020s, they are looking to generate impressions and conversions through clever online marketing—usually leveraging the power and reach of social media platforms. Frequently this takes the form of sharing or reposting content already on social media, sometimes with a creative business-specific twist. More >

“X” Marks the Spot Where Twitter Once Stood – A Lesson in Trademark Searching and Rebranding

In early August, the nearly half a billion users of Twitter looked at their phones and found something perplexing—the instantly-recognizable blue icon with the white silhouette of a bird had vanished, and in its place a black square with a white “X” had appeared. CEO Elon Musk had decided to rebrand Twitter as “X”—but did he think through all the trademark ramifications of this choice before implementing it? More >

Miami Dance Club Hopes New Golf Tour’s Name Will Be Short-LIVed

Over the past few weeks we have been watching CBS’s celebration of college basketball and, during commercial breaks, hearing those familiar musical notes that signal The Masters golf tournament has arrived. So, what better time than now to celebrate Passover, Easter, world class golf, and, naturally, a good trademark dispute.

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How Much “Dune” You Know about Copyright?

A few months ago, an NFT group known as “Spice DAO” made the news for paying nearly $3 million at auction for a rare book of filmmaker Alexander Jodorowsky’s storyboards and concept art for a never-to-be-made adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune—and announcing their plans to use their purchase to make and sell their own adaptations and derivative works as well as copies of the book itself in NFT form. Of course, buying a copy of a book, no matter how rare, does not grant you the copyright or license to its contents. A clear gaff to be sure, which is then heightened by the fact that the purchase was funded almost entirely by investors and fans of the Dune franchise. But if purchasing a creative work does not give you rights to reproduce it, what does? We’ve put together this quick quiz to help you figure out when you do—and don’t—own the rights to a piece of intellectual property covered under copyright law. More >

March Gladness – New KY Law Allows College Athletes to Profit from Use of Name, Image, and Likeness

On March 9^th, Governor Beshear, surrounded by Kentucky college coaches, put his signature on a new law that will allow college athletes to profit from the use of their name, image, and likeness, an opportunity formerly blocked by the NCAA. This new law opens up many doors for college athletes to benefit from their most closely held intellectual property—themselves. More >