How To Write Emails Like A Lawyer

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Email gets a bad rap these days for a lot of reasons. It’s permanent (i.e. not self-destructing like Snapchat), it’s not a good mobile communication solution, it takes too much time, there’s too much of it, it’s rife with spam, and so on and so forth. But I actually love email for a lot of those reasons (not the spam stuff, obviously). To me, these aren’t bugs, they’re features; they’re exactly what makes email a useful business

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UPDATED! Defamation and The Donald: How To CYA When Standing Up To A World-Class Bully

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There’s a difference between a dispassionate telling of the facts, and a heated accusation of wrongdoing. The more your remarks hew towards the latter, the more likely you veer into defamation territory, which robs you of the high road and puts you in danger of getting sued yourself. The last thing you want, as a victim of copyright infringement or breach of contract, is to defend yourself against a defamation claim. And the more prominent they are, the less likely they are to feel bad for suing you. After all, they have a bottom line to maintain, don’t they? 

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Paramount Releases Star Trek Fan Film Guidelines, Shows Other Studios How To Interact With Fans

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Surely you’ve heard by now the story of the troubled fan film, Star Trek: Axanar. The film, which had earned over a million dollars from backers on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, was sued by Paramount for violating “innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes." While Star Trek fan films have been around forever (I was a Trekkie as a kid and remember seeing them a lot at meetings and conventions), Paramount was concerned about Axanar’s size and scale - high quality visual effects, name actors, feature-length runtime, etc. I guess they were concerned that a film of sufficient quality could impact not only the release of Star Trek Beyond, but its future slate of Trek films and spinoffs. 

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When Cosplay Makes You Liable For Copyright Infringement

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If you’re a single person wearing a Batman costume to San Diego Comic-Con, your use is almost certainly non-commercial and you are not liable for copyright infringement. But if you’re a business who specializes in making these costumes, the question becomes a bit more problematic. On its face, it’s easy to assume that it would constitute infringement. After all, DC Comics owns the character of Batman and his general look. If you were to visit your average costume shop looking for a Batman cowl to wear at Halloween, every single one of them would have “officially licensed product” printed on a tag somewhere. No costume designer wants to tempt fate by producing unlicensed Batman merch even if they could get away with it. That’s the smart move.

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How To Keep Your Contracts Brief

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When was the last time you read a contract all the way through? Go on, take a few minutes and really think about it. I bet for most of you, the answer is somewhere between “a long time ago” and “never,” even for those of you who deal with contracts regularly. And you know what? I don’t blame you because most contracts are too long. Nearly every contract I've seen in the last few years has suffered from this problem - page after page of dense legal text. And the result of these overlong legal documents is that people don't read them and fully understand the transaction they're involved in. I know this because many of my clients admit it to me. 

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