By: Justin Brascher

The National Football League (NFL) is the most watched sports league in the United States. For example, in 2019 roughly three quarters of the top 100 most-watched broadcasts in America were NFL games. Because of this, the NFL maintains very tight control over its television rights and makes billions every year in Television rights deals with the major networks. However, some of that control may be taken away from the NFL and placed in the hands of the individual teams themselves, depending on the result of a federal suit that is currently being appeal to the Supreme Court.

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By Eleanor Lyon

“You never want a good crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, once famously said. It seems that Attorney General William Barr and Senator Lindsey Graham were listening.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Senator Lindsey Graham was planning to introduce legislation which would purport to hold tech companies accountable for allowing child pornography to be shared on their sites. The central change proposed by the bill is that it would allow for companies to be sued for recklessly distributing child pornography. If this sounds like a reasoned and principled stand to you, you might want to look a little more closely at what it means to “recklessly distribute” child pornography.

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By: Emily Donohue

As suggested in Part One of my two-part series on the application of the first sale doctrine to digital sales, the legislature should make clarifications and updates to The Copyright Act to apply the first sale doctrine to digital property, and end the chilling effects of uncertainty on innovation in the secondary sales market.

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By: Timothy Chien

As it turns out, millennials aren’t the only ones scrolling through the various news feeds on social media. In recent years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken a keen interest in perusing the numerous social media platformsWith the rise of social media usage, many companies have started harnessing the power of influencer marketing as a way to reach millions of potential new customers. As one of our previous blog posts mentioned, influencer sponsorships are big business, with some celebrity figures commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for product endorsements.

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By: Katie Haas

In November 2019, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled in Alasaad v. McAleenan, that warrantless searches of smartphones and laptops without individualized suspicion (reason to believe the device contained contraband giving rise to a search) at United States airports and ports of entry are violations of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizure.  Filed by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 11 plaintiffs alleged the Department of Homeland Security, The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violated their constitutional rights by requiring that they turn over their phones and computers for extensive searches of their data before reentry into the United States.

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