Author: Don Franzen

Seventh Edition New and Noteworthy Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen The End of Deepfakes? For years, states have had laws restricting the use of a celebrity’s “name, image and likeness” for commercial purposes such as advertising (see, for example, California’s Civil Code Section 3344 and New York’s Civil Rights Law §§ […]

Sixth Edition New and Noteworthy Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen AI Litigation Round Up Talk about a fast moving target. Any attempt to summarize the status of AI litigation will face immediate obsolescence. Subject to that caveat, here’s a representative sample of litigations challenging the use of AI to generate visual, […]

Fifth Edition Interview with Manaswi Mishra Part I By Don Franzen and Judith Finell On July 12, 2023, Your Inside Track‘s co-editors interviewed Manaswi Mishra, a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. They discussed recent developments in Al generative music and their implications for copyright law and the music industry. Don Franzen For our […]

Fifth Edition Interview with Manaswi Mishra Part II By Don Franzen and Judith Finell Don Franzen A lot of the pending lawsuits are focused on using copyrighted material to train AI. Can you explain what is involved in training AI, and how the source material is fed into it? What’s that process like?  Manaswi Mishra […]

Fifth Edition New and Noteworthy: Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen HAS THE SUPREME COURT TRANSFORMED FAIR USE? Since the Supreme Court decision involving the 2 Live Crew’s parody version of Roy Orbison’s song “Pretty Woman,” the touchstone of fair use analysis in copyright infringement cases has been whether the new work […]

Can Your Lyrics Send You to Jail?  The tension between free speech and criminal prosecution. By Don Franzen, Attorney and Adjunct Professor Herb Alpert School of Music University of California Los Angeles “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you,” or so the old maxim goes. Yet, in recent years, […]

Third Edition New and Noteworthy: Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen WARHOL GOES TO THE SUPREME COURT In a case that could have far-reaching impact on all the creative arts, including music, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the controversial decision of the Second Circuit in Andy Warhol Foundation for […]

Second Edition New and Noteworthy: Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen The Dark Horse Wins the Race The long battle over whether Katy Perry infringed the copyright of the Christian Rap artist known as “Flame” may be over. Back in 2014, Marcus Gray, aka “Flame,” filed suit against Perry and others alleging Perry’s […]

First Edition News and Noteworthy: Recent Developments in Music and Copyright By Don Franzen Is Embedding a Copyright Violation? In August this year, a federal judge in New York took issue with the Ninth Circuit’s so-called “server rule.”  Under that rule, a website publisher displays an image by using a computer to fill a computer […]

First Edition “Streaming Devalues Music” Interview with Julia Holter This interview has been edited for publication. Don Franzen: I’m delighted to be speaking with Julia Holter, a phenomenal independent musician, composer, songwriter, all-around musical talent, original in many, many ways. But more recently you were in the headlines for picketing Spotify in Downtown Los Angeles […]