Entertainment & Media

To make money in entertainment and media, you need to clearly understand your rights, including your rights in your image, your creations, and your brand. You need to know the steps to take to protect those rights, and the rights you may acquire, license, or give away through contracts. You need an attorney who has spent time in the media and entertainment industries and understands how they work, someone who has reviewed, drafted, and negotiated all types of media contracts including copyright and trademark licenses, live entertainment agreements, film agreements using SAG-AFTRA talent, and work made for hire agreements. You need someone who knows the intricacies of the Copyright Act — including the DMCA — and the Trademark Act and how to use them to protect your rights.

I’m Rick Mortensen, and I can help. I have handled entertainment and media law matters throughout my career, in private practice and as an in-house attorney at Overstock, Jamberry Nails, and Renatus. My interest in entertainment law began before law school, when I worked as an arts and entertainment journalist in Los Angeles. I discovered that the people running record labels and film studios were attorneys, and when I got to law school, I gravitated toward courses that would teach me what they knew. I spent a summer at the Entertainment Law Institute at Southwestern Law School, where I took classes in music publishing, film production, and entertainment industry labor law. I learned that, aside from how to read complicated contracts, entertainment lawyers know copyright and trademark law and how they intersect with more arcane doctrines like moral rights, right to publicity, and false light defamation.  During my third year of law school, I wrote a law review article exploring the ways the U.S. Trademark Act and the U.S. Copyright Act affect artists’ moral rights, which was published in the Spring 2006 edition of the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law.

Call or email, and let me know how I can help with your entertainment & media law needs.