Copyright & Entertainment Law

Overview

If you make a living being creative, you need to protect your work and ensure that others do not infringe upon it now and in the future. Our experienced Copyright and Entertainment Law team can effectively develop and implement a customized strategy to protect your creative works. Whether you are an entertainer, artist, musician or author, we can help you take a proactive approach to minimize the risk of counterfeiters impacting your earnings.

Counseling and Risk Assessment

For many businesses, copyrights are core business assets. In an evolving digital marketplace, emerging technologies and changes in national copyright laws create new opportunities to exploit such assets globally, but also present new infringement risks. Our copyright attorneys help navigate this evolving legal landscape to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks. Protecting a copyright or trademark as an artist or entertainer, especially online, requires understanding the nature of copyrights and other intellectual property issues and how to best protect creative work.

Special care should also be taken whenever entering into a contract involving the rights of a work. Our experienced Copyright and Entertainment Law team can provide guidance on establishing a personal service agreement between you and a company that might manufacture, promote or distribute your work.

Copyright Registration and Use

Unlike patents, copyrights are automatically established on the date of creation. However, creative artists should register their work with the U.S. Copyright Office to ensure exclusive use. Copyrights remain in effect for varying lengths of time, depending on whether the creator is an individual or a corporation. The authority for copyright protection can be found in United States Code Title 17.  It provides to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.  Protection is available for both published and unpublished works.

While copyright law permits limited unauthorized fair use of work, such as for academic studies or criticism of the work in question, in some circumstances, users may infringe via unauthorized reproduction, distribution or adaptation. Your works must be registered properly to benefit from the maximum extent of the copyright laws.

We help our clients acquire, register, maintain, protect, license and enforce copyrights across a diverse range of subject matter and media including books, music, computer software, audiovisual works, digital content, drawings, photographs and motion pictures. Our creative solutions allow clients to control the reproduction, distribution, display and even translation of their work into other languages and media.

Copyright Enforcement and Defense

Whether you are seeking copyright enforcement or defense, our team is dedicated to zealously advocate for your interests and deliver superior results specifically calibrated to your business goals, risks and budget.

Knowing when and how to proceed in a copyright infringement situation takes expertise and legal know-how. In every lawsuit, your business interest is at the forefront and we take the litigation posture that best improves your business. As always, our goal is to resolve copyright and related issues as swiftly, cost effectively and positively as possible for our clients.

Consult With a Skilled Intellectual Property Attorney

For the advice and guidance, you need on copyrights and other issues related to entertainment and creative works, meet with one of our skilled intellectual property attorneys. We proudly serve clients in southern California and across the United States. Call us a call today or contact us online for a free consultation.