Archive for Intellectual Property Law
New MySpace CEO Hiring Raises the Employment Contract Specter
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According to VentureBeat and TechCrunch, MySpace recently replaced Chris Wolfe with its new CEO, Owen Van Natta (see here). TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington adroitly points out that Van Natta, who used to be Chief Revenue Officer at Facebook before briefly running Project Playlist:
“Van Natta owns a significant percentage of Facebook stock and is of course intimately knowledgeable about their business. At the very least it’s bad form for him to join Facebook’s primary competitor. At worst there may be legal issues since it will be extremely difficult for him to continue to protect confidential Facebook information in his new job.”
We’ve discussed these exact kinds of legal issues before in our post on non-compete agreements here. We’ve also extensively reviewed employment contracts when it comes to non-compete, confidentiality and intellectual property issues, and offer you (at no charge) our sophisticated Confidentiality, Non-Compete, Non-Solicitation, and Assignment of Rights Agreement here. Also, check out our other confidentiality agreements here.
You can be almost positive that Van Natta has signed a similar agreement with Facebook. Now, California law greatly limits the enforceability of non-compete restrictions, believing that people should be free to pursue the job of their choice, so it’s unlikely that Facebook can use an old non-compete contract to stop Van Natta from taking the helm at MySpace. But California doesn’t also throw out intellectual property restrictions, so you have to wonder how Van Natta will continue to protect Facebook confidential information and trade secrets that remain in his memory, especially since MySpace will need to build out new and exciting tools to bring more users to their site because Facebook is growing much faster.
From Facebook’s perspective, this risk is greatly heightened by Van Natta’s jump to MySpace. It’s one thing when he left to take over Project Playlist, a music web site, but quite another with his move to MySpace, Facebook’s top competitor in the social networking space. The in-house legal department at Facebook is probably scrutinizing Van Natta’s old Facebook contract as we speak because of this very concern. It will be very interesting to see how this nascent dispute will play out.
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I couldn’t resist posting this anti-piracy video from Warner Bros. To make this video, the creators edited Casablanca dialogue (between the legendary Humphrey DeForest Bogart himself and the luminous Ingrid Bergman) and inserted various white on black statements like:
“Rick Is Really Upset”
“The Woman He Loves Is Pirating DVDs”
“No Matter How You Say It . . .”
“Pirating Is Stealing”
“Rick’s Feelings Tell Him Piracy Is Wrong”
“Deep Down Ilsa Feels It Too”
“Making Time With Victor’s Girl: Good”
“Pirating DVDs: Bad”
Look, I suppose I’m against rampant copying, too, but there’s something so heavy handed and Orwellian about the film and music industries’ efforts to curb piracy. These people have brought us the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which tries to eviscerate fair use rights that are the bedrock of copyright law), have repeatedly sued low income individuals (without even proving that they actually pirated anything), force onerous licensing agreements and contracts on consumers, and wield tremendous political pressure to enlist our nation’s law enforcement officers and trade negotiators in their cause (when many other businesses that suffer from wrongdoing can’t even get the time of day from the government). Even the Obama Administration recently came out in support of the $150,000 per infringement penalty.
Hearts and minds, Mr. Selznick, hearts and minds.
Click here to see it in all its glory.
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Captain Copyright Strikes Again
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ComicMix has a nice article up here about the ins and outs of copyrights and trademarks for entertainment law. This is highly recommended reading if you want to get a quick introductory overview of the subject. The article summarizes a speech given at New York ComicCon last week by my friends (and talented lawyers) Sheafe Walker and Thomas A. Crowell. Apparently the folks at ComicMix were kind enough to include Captain Copyright (swooping in for an appearance at left) so all of us can worship his mighty fair use powers.
Keep up on Mr. Crowell’s latest updates on entertainment and intellectual property law by becoming a fan at his Facebook Page for his acclaimed book, The Pocket Lawyer for Filmmakers.
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