A full-service firm with a national – and global – footprint, Loeb & Loeb provides a wide array of legal services through its six offices in the US and two in China. In litigation specifically, the firm has deep ties to the entertainment industry. “It’s really time to take a closer look at Loeb & Loeb,” says one contemporary. “For entertainment litigation, they are really quite dominant. They have some strong connections there, some very high-profile clients.”
Not surprisingly, much of this is serviced by practitioners in its Los Angeles office. A team of Loeb litigators, led by partner
Jim Curry, represents CBS in litigation relating to the popular daytime television program “Judge Judy,” including defending CBS against first-of-their-kind cases involving claims that a sale of a television library should trigger a “buy-out” of the profit participant’s interest. The Loeb team also previously defended CBS against a related case where a former agent and profit participant sought a declaration that Judge Judy’s salary is too high and should not be deducted as a profit participation. Curry and his team won the case on appeal of the granting of summary judgment to CBS.
LA partners John Gatti and
Lauren Fried represent Miramax and its related licensees, including Amazon and Walmart, among others, in a suit brought by a photographer that claimed to own the rights to an iconic photograph of Uma Thurman used in a poster for the movie “Pulp Fiction,” which Miramax produced. After decades of Miramax licensing the image, the photographer claimed for the first time in his 2020 lawsuit that he owned the photograph, that Miramax had no right to exploit the photo in any way, and that Miramax and each of its licensees were liable for copyright infringement. The Loeb team successfully secured an order that the photographer was late in filing any copyright registration, thereby limiting the alleged damages. Gatti and Fried also represent singer/songwriter Tracy Chapman in a copyright-infringement case based on rapper and songwriter Nicki Minaj’s sampling of Chapman’s works without permission. On summary judgment, the district court found triable issues of fact as to whether Minaj could be held liable on Chapman’s distribution claim and set a date for trial. Minaj subsequently agreed to pay Chapman the full amount of damages sought and judgment was entered in the federal court case in Chapman’s favor for nearly half a million dollars.
Operating from the firm’s New York office,
Barry Slotnick and Tal Dickstein represent a group of six music publishers in a copyright-infringement action against the owners and operators of the website Wolfgangs.com, an online collection of recordings of thousands of live concert performances. The collections consisted primarily of audio and audiovisual recordings of concert performances from the 1960s to the 2000s by artists such as the Rolling Stones, The Who and the Grateful Dead. Defendants acquired the concert recordings primarily from the concert promoters and concert venues that recorded the concerts. Defendants converted those recordings to digital format and made them available for streaming or download to subscribers of their websites. The music publishers asserted that defendants’ exploitation of the recordings constituted copyright infringement of more than 200 works to which they owned the copyrights. Dickstein and Slotnick also defended UMG Recordings, PeerMusic and Warner Records, the publishers and record labels for the hit song “You Raise Me Up,” which was initially released by the Irish band Secret Garden in 2001, and then released by the US performing artist Josh Groban in 2003. The plaintiff, an Icelandic songwriter, claims “You Raise Me Up” infringes an Icelandic song titled “Soknudur.”
