PARRON LAW ® | Entertainment and Sports Blog

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to be able to participate as a panelist at the American Bar Association's Second Annual Legal Symposium on the World of Music, Film, Television and Sports, which was held at the W Hotel on Miami Beach. The name of this year's event was "From Hollywood to South Beach," and the specific panel I was a part of examined music and television around the world, with my input focusing mostly on the TV end of the spectrum. The entire thing was interesting and informative, to say the least, plus, hey, the Situation from Jersey Shore was there as one of the guest speakers, so you can't really argue with that kind of entertainment value. (For the record, he's a good guy and pretty sharp businessman.) During our discussion, my panel managed to get on the topic of not just social media but guerrilla marketing and how a lot of celebrities and would-be celebrities -- as well as the outlets that promote them -- are making it work for them...

A couple of days ago I finally got around to seeing "Tron: Legacy," the sequel to the 1982 cult classic from Disney that you might say was the Patient Zero for an entire generation of films using CGI effects. For those who never saw the original movie (my friends and I loved it as kids) it centered on a computer whiz named Kevin Flynn, played by a young Jeff Bridges, who gets trapped inside a game he created and has to fight his way out by assuming the role of one of the game's characters. In addition to making you never look at those little guys you're controlling in your video games the same way again (while you can just shut the game off and walk away, it's apparently life and death for them) "Tron" was one of those rare movies you walked out of thinking that you'd never seen anything quite like it. It wasn't a great movie by any means, but it broke a whole lot of new ground both in terms of the way it was made and the future it predicted in w...

A couple of days ago on my personal Facebook page I posted an old video from Bow Wow Wow, the seminal track I Want Candy . That started a debate among the commenters over an inarguably hot topic for elitists, purists and the simply nostalgic: What, if anything, killed music? There have always been cookie-cutter acts out there, bands thrown together by greedy and opportunistic promoters and musicians exploited by Svengali-like managers. But it seems like now more than ever, the entire recording industry has become one big dodge aimed at cranking out formulaic music, attuned to pounce on any bandwagon, and existing solely for the purpose of raking in piles of cash -- often at the expense of the artists some say it's doing nothing but taking advantage of. Thanks to the Internet and social media, it's easy to create a buzz or a viral sensation (sometimes that sensation creates itself; see: Rebecca Black) and with the use of Pro Tools and the dreaded auto-tune in the studio, the...

Last week, Boston College of Law Professor Ray D. Madoff (no relation to Bernie, one would hope) wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the subject of publicity and identity rights. Titled "The New Grave Robbers," the essay essentially decried the relatively new phenomenon of estates asserting control and copyright privileges over culturally prominent figures well after those figures' deaths. The example Professor Madoff uses right off the bat: does marketing a wig made of wild white hair and a bushy moustache qualify as an "Einstein costume," and would the unauthorized selling of such a costume mean the estate of Albert Einstein, who's been dead for more than a half-century, could sue in court? According to Professor Madoff, who wrote a polemical book called Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead , a person's identity shouldn't be able to be sustained legally long after he or she has died. She asserts that this real...