A few examples I will wrap together: one was for the rapper Fabolous, not fabulous but Fabolous.
But in so winning, they probably spent a quarter of a million dollars or more to show that the claim was frivolous. In each of these four or five instances, the defendants whom I was working with won motions for summary judgment. I want to give a couple of examples of some of the kinds of cases that are highly frivolous: in 2005 I was involved probably in about five issues from federal court in Washington state to southern district in Florida, Miami to Boston the first circuit and here, right here, the southern district of New York. It is the problem of the small person, the person who doesn’t have a lot of equity or power, crushed by major corporations in fact, in many cases, it is a frivolous lawsuit, one after one after another that is causing harm to the overall creative process and to the artist. I look at this from both ends because I work with both plaintiffs and defendants, but I am concerned at the exposure of frivolous suits. DJ Spooky, whose book Rhythm Science was published last year by MIT Press.įerrara: One of the things that interests me a great deal on fair use is that I do a great deal of consulting for all the major record companies, and many of the independent companies and the publishers and the motion picture companies. The panelists were Lawrence Ferrara, Chair of the Department of Music and Performing Arts at NYU and a specialist in copyright law Claudia Gonson, drummer and manager for the pop group The Magnetic Fields Hank Shocklee, legendary producer of Public Enemy and Paul Miller, a.k.a. Kembrew McLeod, a documentary filmmaker and scholar of intellectual property law, moderated the panel.
The event was organized by NYU Journalism Professor Rob Boynton, in conjunction with the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, which is under the direction of Lawrence Weschler. The following panel discussion took place as part of “The Comedies of Fair U$e,” a conference on copyright and intellectual property held from April 28–30 at NYU.