Legal insights
Analysis from the front lines of IP & technology law.
Our attorneys write about the developments shaping intellectual property—from the PTAB and the Federal Circuit to the practical realities of protecting fast-moving technology.
Image Rights Toolkit: Claim Evaluation Worksheets, Response Letters, and Image Licensing Records
This toolkit collects the working papers for handling image copyright claims, each introduced by its purpose, owner, and when to use it, and each followed by drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. The evaluation templates are a claim intake and Section 412 worksheet and an exposure calculator that prices license value, statutory damages, copyright management information claims, fee risk, and the Copyright Claims Board alternative. The correspondence templates are a request for proof, a no-liability response, a settlement counteroffer, and a tender letter to insurers and vendors. A Board opt-out decision memo and a settlement agreement and release follow. The prevention templates are an image licensing record and an internal image use policy. A running example involving a Denver outdoor retailer fills in the samples throughout.
Estate Publicity Rights Toolkit: State Registrations, Licensing Terms, and Enforcement Letters
This toolkit collects the working papers an estate needs to own, register, license, and enforce a deceased person's publicity rights, each introduced by its purpose, its owner, and when to use it. It includes a domicile evidence memo, a persona and estate inventory, a state rights map, and registration worksheets for California and New York. The licensing papers cover an assignment from the estate or trust to a licensing company, an approval process and decision matrix, a license term sheet, a licensing agency term sheet, and a digital replica consent addendum for AI voices and likenesses. The enforcement papers include a demand letter for commercial misuse, a very different letter for expressive works, a marketplace takedown notice, a use and enforcement log, and an appraisal information request for estate tax. A running example follows a fictional actress's estate through every template, and the drafting notes tie each clause to the governing statute or case.
Copyright Licensing and Clearance Toolkit: Permissions, Rights, and Chain of Title
Clearance is the practice of knowing, before publication, exactly who owns each element of a work and exactly what you are permitted to do with it. This toolkit builds that practice. It starts with the inventory step that most projects skip, which is listing every separately owned element in a work, then works through identifying the owner and confirming chain of title, determining whether a license is needed at all, negotiating the license terms that actually matter, and documenting the result in a form that survives a distributor audit or an insurance underwriter. Separate stages cover the media-specific traps in music, photography, film, software, and user-generated content, the special problems of orphan works and public domain determinations, and what to do when clearance fails and the choice is between redesigning, relying on fair use, or accepting the risk.
Residential Landlord-Tenant Law: A Practical Guide for Small Landlords
Owning a rental property is a regulated business, and the regulations are local, unforgiving, and largely invisible until something goes wrong. This guide covers the residential landlord-tenant relationship from screening through possession. It starts with the fair housing rules that govern advertising and tenant selection, including the source-of-income and criminal-history restrictions that many landlords have never heard of, then the lease itself and the provisions that are void by statute in most states. It covers security deposits, where the penalties for a late or unitemized return frequently exceed the deposit itself, and the implied warranty of habitability and the tenant remedies that follow from a breach. Later sections address entry, retaliation, and the eviction process in detail, including the self-help prohibition that converts a rent dispute into a damages claim against the landlord.
Mobile App Launch Legal Checklist: A Practical Checklist
You finished building the app—now the legal work begins, and most of it should happen before the launch party. This checklist walks the founder, in-house lawyer, and curious layperson through everything between "feature complete" and "live in the store," roughly in the order the risks bite: a liability-shield entity, signed IP assignments from every contractor, surviving Apple's and Google's developer agreements in a post-Epic v. Apple world, enforceable EULA/terms via conspicuous clickwrap, a privacy policy that matches the store labels, the auto-renewal/ROSCA subscription minefield, ADA/WCAG accessibility, COPPA for kids' data, advertising truthfulness, open-source license compliance, and export/encryption rules. Each phase pairs checkboxes with the WHY and the traps, plus common mistakes, primary authority, and related mclaw.io resources. The law here is fast-moving in 2026; treat this as a sophisticated map, not a substitute for counsel.
Music Licensing in the Streaming Era: Mechanical Royalties, the MLC, and Direct Licensing Deals
Every time a listener presses play, one stream sets in motion one of the most intricate rights-clearance systems ever built, implicating two separate copyrights, four collective organizations, and reporting obligations across dozens of countries. This article explains how music licensing actually works in the streaming era—what rights exist, who holds them, how they are licensed at statutory and negotiated rates, and what every participant must navigate—by following an independent songwriter and a fictional streaming service through the whole machine. It covers the two copyrights in every recording, the mechanical right and the §115 compulsory license, the disaster that preceded the Music Modernization Act of 2018, the blanket license and the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the performance world of the PROs and the ASCAP/BMI consent decrees, sound-recording licensing and SoundExchange under §114, sync and master-use licensing, controlled composition clauses, and the direct deals running outside the collective system. It incorporates the 2024–2026 developments, including the Phonorecords IV all-in rate (15.1% rising to 15.35% of revenue) running through 2027, the dismissal—and partial revival—of the MLC's bundling suit against Spotify, and the majors' "around-the-bundle" deals.
Copyright Notice Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A copyright notice is the familiar line, c 2026 Acme Corp., that announces who owns a work and when it was published. For works published after March 1, 1989, notice is optional, but it still delivers concrete legal benefits, chiefly foreclosing an infringer's innocent-infringement plea that can otherwise drop statutory damages to as little as $200 per work. This checklist walks a creator or adviser through composing a complete and correct notice, choosing the right symbol for copies versus sound recordings, naming the actual owner, dating revisions honestly, placing the notice where people look and embedding it in digital files, and handling derivative, collective, and government-work situations. It also pairs notice with timely registration. Confirm the date a work was first published, since the legal effect of notice turns on it.
Running an Ethical and Profitable Law Practice: A Practical Guide
This guide covers the operational side of practicing law: the systems that prevent discipline and the practices that make a firm financially sustainable. It works through intake and conflicts, the engagement letter and what its scope section must exclude, fee structures and how to choose among them, the trust accounting routine that must run monthly, docketing redundancy, file and document management, client communication cadence, and the financial metrics a small firm should actually track. It then covers the risk side: malpractice coverage, cybersecurity obligations, remote and multijurisdictional practice, and succession planning that most jurisdictions now expect.
Intellectual Property Licenses in Bankruptcy: Section 365(n), Mission Product, and Protecting Your License
When a licensor files for bankruptcy, the license that a licensee's entire business depends on becomes a contract the debtor may reject. Congress addressed part of that problem in 1988 by adding section 365(n), which lets a licensee of intellectual property elect to retain its rights after rejection. But the Bankruptcy Code's definition of intellectual property omits trademarks, which left trademark licensees exposed for three decades. The Supreme Court closed most of that gap in Mission Product Holdings v. Tempnology, holding that rejection is a breach rather than a rescission and therefore does not terminate rights the contract already conveyed. This article explains the whole framework: when a license is an executory contract, what rejection actually does, how section 365(n) elections work and what they cost, why trademarks were left out and what Mission Product did and did not fix, the separate and often more dangerous question of whether a license can be assumed and assigned over the licensee's objection under section 365(c), and what a section 363 sale free and clear means for a licensee. It closes with drafting and diligence measures that actually protect a licensee, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Consumer Health Data Outside HIPAA: My Health My Data, the FTC, and the Apps That Know Too Much
Most people assume HIPAA protects their period tracker, glucose app, and online pharmacy intake form, and most of the time it does not. This article explains where HIPAA actually stops and what takes over: section 5 of the FTC Act, the FTC's amended Health Breach Notification Rule, Washington's My Health My Data Act and its private right of action, Nevada and Connecticut's parallel laws, California's Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, and Illinois's genetic privacy statute. It walks through what physically happens when an app's software development kit or a website's pixel sends an event to an ad platform, because the technology decides most of the legal questions. It reads the leading cases closely, including the 2026 appellate decisions in Rand v. Eyemart Express, Santoro v. Tower Health, and J.M. v. Illuminate Education, and the Flo Health litigation that ended in a jury verdict against Meta. It covers reproductive health and location data after the vacatur of the HIPAA reproductive rule, and it states plainly what remains unsettled as of November 2026.
Responding to a Consumer Class Action Demand Letter
A pre-suit demand letter asserting class claims is a very different document from an individual demand, because the sender is not trying to resolve one customer's problem—they are testing whether a practice is worth suing over. The recipient's response, or the absence of one, tells them. This guide covers what to do in the first two weeks, how to evaluate the underlying claim and the realistic class exposure rather than the number in the letter, the statutory notice-and-cure provisions that make a prompt response genuinely valuable, how arbitration clauses and class waivers change the analysis and where mass arbitration has changed it back, when to settle individually and when doing so invites the next letter, and what a classwide resolution actually requires. It closes with serial demand programs, the regulatory track that runs alongside the private one, and the internal relationships that make a fast factual answer possible.
Protection of Trade Secrets
Trade secrets are the only form of intellectual property you create simply by keeping something valuable secret and guarding it sensibly, and they can last forever if you do. This guide explains what qualifies as a trade secret under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. 1836) and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, how misappropriation works, and the full menu of remedies, including the DTSA's dramatic ex parte civil seizure power and the case law that governs when courts actually grant it. It walks through the practical "reasonable measures" program that separates a protectable secret from an unprotectable one, the enforcement playbook from forensic investigation through injunction, and the tangle of NDAs and non-competes (including the now-dead FTC non-compete rule and the patchwork of state law). It covers the inevitable-disclosure doctrine, the Economic Espionage Act criminal track, the lessons of Waymo v. Uber, and the strategic choice between patenting an invention and keeping it secret. The aim is a single, readable map of U.S. trade secret law that a judge, a lawyer, and a curious founder can all follow.