About

Your Inside Track

About

We are presenting this newsletter to share new developments in music copyright, including trial results, deals, legislation, and technology impacting protections for intellectual property.

We will examine these through combined lenses of musicology and law. We will target game-changing decisions, settlements, and other news impacting the music industry and its content creators.

Music and sound design are increasingly embedded in many areas of our lives.

Most devices and software are identified with a sound mark or musical logo. Theme music and soundtracks appear in most film, television, video games, advertising, and public gatherings. Whenever new technologies are developed within the recording, publication, media, or broadcast industries, disputes invariably arise presenting legal challenges not yet considered or addressed.

Today, we are faced with AI-created music, boom sales of legacy music catalogs, sharing of music over social and streaming platforms, and new capacities at replicating and copying from pre-existing musical works and recordings – with and without permission.

We hope you will join us in our exploration of this newly growing landscape.


The Editors

Don Franzen’s legal practice covers the spectrum of the entertainment industry, including recording, television, film, live entertainment, copyright, trademarks, endorsements, corporate, tax and visa issues, and non-profit organizations.  His clients include composers, producers, vocal and instrumental artists, as well as performing arts organizations.  In addition to providing business and legal advice, he has acted an as a producer on recording, video, and theatrical projects.  He also has established an expertise in commercial civil litigation, including appellate practice (State and Federal).  He has lectured on entertainment law for Eastman School of Music, the Santa Monica College Academy of Entertainment, the Colburn School of Music, the California Institute of the Arts, and is a visiting professor at the Berklee School of Music (Valencia, Spain).  Since 2009 he has taught  courses on music and the law at the Herb Albert School of Music, University of California Los Angeles, and effective 2016 has been appointed as an adjunct professor as part of its Music Industry Program.  Since 1997 he has been chosen as a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California.  He serves as the Legal Affairs Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and has authored various essays and book reviews on legal topics.  He is a founding director of the Los Angeles Opera, and a director of Heyday Books. In addition to his native English, he speaks Spanish, Italian and conversational German.  He is married to Dale Franzen and proud father of three children. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Judith Finell, Judith Finell MusicServices Inc., http://jfmusicservices.com

Judith Finell is a musicologist and the president of Judith Finell MusicServices Inc., a music consulting firm in New York and Los Angeles, founded 25 years ago in New York. Since then, she has served as consultant and expert witness involving music copyright infringement, advised on artist career and project development, and a wide variety of music industry topics. Recently, Ms. Finell was honored to be the 2018 commencement speaker at UCLA’s Herb Albert School of Music. She was also interviewed by NBC/Universal for a 2018 documentary entitled “The Universality of Music,” in which she discussed the ways in which she sees music as being an international language that can bridge cultural barriers that spoken language does not.

Judith Finell was the testifying expert for the Marvin Gaye family in the milestone “Blurred Lines” case in Federal Court. She has testified in many other notable copyright infringement trials over the past 20 years. She and her team of musicologists regularly advise HBO, Lionsgate, Grey Advertising, CBS, Warner, Disney, and Sony Pictures on musical works for their commercials, films, and television series. Ms. Finell also frequently advises attorneys, advertising agencies, entertainment and recording companies, publishing firms, and musicians, addressing copyright issues, including those arising from digital sampling, electronic technology and Internet musical usage.

Ms. Finell was invited to teach forensic musicology at UCLA in 2018, where she continues to teach the only such course in the country. She holds an M.A. degree in musicology from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. from UCLA in piano performance. She has written numerous articles and a book in the area of contemporary music and copyright infringement and has appeared in trials on Court TV and before the American Intellectual Property Law Association. She is a trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and has appeared as a guest lecturer at the law schools of Harvard University, UCLA, Stanford, Columbia, Vanderbilt, George Washington, NYU, and Fordham, as well as the Beverly Hills Bar Assn., LA Copyright Society, and the Association of Independent Music Publishers. She may be reached by e- mail at [email protected].

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