Entertainment Lawyer Podcast... Priceless free advice!

Entertainment Law Podcast 360 Deal

            In this podcast from entertainment lawyers they are discussing the 360 deals that are becoming more popular in the music industry.  Record labels are doing these deals because of the decline in record sales, and they are finding different ways to collect money from the artist.  360 deals allows the record label to get paid off of sponsorship, endorsements, live touring, websites, and much more.  These deals can encompass all the rights or partial rights.  There are two types of 360 deals,  ownership of rights deal and income participation deal.   The ownership of rights deal, is a deal where the label owns the rights that they receive income on.  The incomeparticipation deal is when the label does not own the rights, but they just receive income on the different deals. 

            In this podcast these lawyers are giving great advice for artist to look out for while making these 360 deals with labels, but they are also giving great advice for record labels on how to put these deals to together that protects their label.   Also, the podcast discusses the importance of rights and how to protect you as an artist.  For example, they talk about the case of Drake being sued by his ex-girlfriend for using a recorded voicemail on the song Marvin’s Room.  His ex-girlfriend is suing to get co-writer credits.  She is getting credits for song credits on another song on the album, but now she feels she should be credited for this song because of the recorded voicemail that has been used.  Many of us would think that Drake is going to end up paying her a large amount of money, but the lawyers saying that she did not bring that much creative flow the track, and she should not get the credit.  But the lawyers are saying this is a case of how artist should make sure they have everything squared away in the beginning so you will not end up in case like this.  These podcast are very helpful for any up and coming artist or label executive.  They are giving great advice that can help protect you from losing a lot of money in the future. 

Kellie B. 

Intellectual Property in My Industry

-->

Intellectual Property exists in every industry throughout the world.  Intellectual Property has been put into place to protect the rights of business owners.  There some intellectual properties that people may be unaware of that may affect them in their industry.  It is very important to know these so you do not violate any of them and end up in a lawsuit or even worse arrested with charges.  In the energydrink industry there has been a recent incident in the Philippines that have a few people under arrest for violation of unfair competition. 

Energy Food & Drinks, Inc. had the exclusive rights to distribute Red Bull in the Philippines and T.C. Pharmaceutical Industries was the manufacturer of Red Bull and had its local distributor Maryland Distributors start distributing the energy drink.  TCPI has used MDI labels on the bottles of Red Bull that should have been EFDI, and this has led up to the lawsuit. 

This incident is very important for my company because we are currently working out an agreement with the owners of Cloud 9, which will give our company the exclusive rights to distribute Cloud 9 to the Las Vegas casinos.  Our ultimate goal is to have exclusive rights to distribute Cloud 9 through the United States.  We want to make sure we will not have an incidents were we can violate unfair competition.  We need to make sure Cloud 9 does not have any other distribution deals that could interfere with our exclusive rights deal.  Also, we want to make sure we have all of our paperwork in line to make sure we are protected and that another company cannot get the rights we have. 

EDFI and TCPI allegedly parted ways in 2009, but EDFI claims to have the exclusive rights since 1993, and they are currently the holders of certificate of product registration with the Food and Drug Administration.  This seems to be a case of making sure a company does its research and knows who has the rights to distribute, and again this a great case study for start up companies to make sure they do not end up in a situation like this.