With the Paramount Decrees gone, that opened the way for a studio like Sony Pictures to purchase the Alamo Drafthouse chain, completely legally. Sony is the first major studio to make this move, but not the only one thinking about it. Amazon has been rumored to be eyeing the theater chain AMC for a future buyout. While maybe not a monopoly in the same way as in the old Hollywood system, some believe cinema is once again becoming a monopoly, with how many studios are buying up and acquiring other studios, making the entertainment we consumed controlled by fewer and fewer companies. Movie studios being able to buy up theaters and theater chains could contribute to that, once again giving them control over distribution and exhibition of the films that we watch.
Have you ever noticed the endless stream of brand endorsements flooding your social media feed? Maybe you’d never even considered buying that gadget or outfit, but after watching a few influencer hauls and product reviews, you suddenly find yourself engaging in overconsumption.
While endorsement content may be enticing enough to make you click “add to cart,” they also raise important questions: just how truthful—and lawful—are these advertisements? To answer that question, we must examine the legislation that governs marketing practices, as enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
FTC Guidance: What Brands and Businesses Can Do to Prevent Liability
In direct response to the rise in influencer marketing, the FTC has published guidelines on how brands and influencers can collaborate while ensuring compliance with U.S. consumer protection laws. Per the guidelines, the FTC advises influencers to always “disclose when [they] have any financial, employment, personal, or family relationship with a brand.” This means that, whether the influencer was paid to promote the brand or merely gifted free products, the influencer must still make the appropriate disclosures to remain legally compliant.
In regard to disclosure placements, the FTC emphasizes that disclosures should be easily noticeable by consumers. For example, the FTC discourages placing the disclosures within a list of hashtags or links; instead, disclosures should appear directly alongside the message of endorsement. For video content, the FTC recommends including disclosures in the video itself in addition to the accompanying caption. As for language, disclosures should be written in clear and simple terms—ranging from direct acknowledgments of brand partnerships to shorter hashtags like “#sponsored” or “#ad.”
Influencer marketing represents a modern form of advertising—one that is both highly accessible and incredibly personal, blurring the line between genuine content and paid promotion. Left unchecked, influencer marketing—which involves consistent and personal engagement with consumers—can easily lead to negative impacts on consumption. The FTC’s new rule and guidelines help protect consumer rights while giving companies and influencers the freedom to develop their brands, honor their creativity, and grow their businesses.
The internet has made it incredibly easy for people to find, copy, and paste other’s photography. But what are the legal protections available for photographers? How likely is it that artists, well-known or novice, can find every unlawful use of their copyrighted work? In a groundbreaking case, photographer Scott Hargis made history with a record-setting damages award for the unauthorized use of his photographs.
Statutory damages are damages awarded by a judge or jury in a copyright infringement suit to a copyright owner. The amount of statutory damages awarded to a copyright owner when copyright infringement is found depends on whether the infringement is considered innocent or willful. A court may find innocent infringement when the defendant, or infringer, can demonstrate they were “not aware and had no reason to believe that the activity constituted an infringement.” However, innocent infringement cannot be found when there was a proper copyright notice on the work, as found in Hargis v. Pacific Senior Living Management.
Protection of Photographers Works in the Growing World of AI
In 2019, Copytrack, a global company that enforces image rights, investigated how many photographer’s images are stolen on the internet. They estimated that more than 2.5 billion images are stolen daily. Hargis v. Pacific Senior Living Management demonstrates how seriously U.S. courts view the infringement of photographs and the financial impact unlawful uses of copyrighted works can result in. Currently, with the ever growing world of AI, more lawsuits are popping up, with claims that AI companies are infringing on their copyrights by using the owner’s images to train AI Models.
Hargis v. Pacific Senior Living Management sets a powerful precedent for protecting photographers’ right in the growing digital era and the severe financial consequences of infringement, especially willful infringement. Photographs, and other copyrighted works, are exposed to misuse and as courts began to evaluate AI’s use of copyrighted material, the lessons from Hargis v. Pacific Senior Living Management may play an instrumental role in decision making and serve as a warning to infringers.
A well-known adage about the internet is that once something is put online, it lives there forever. From your favorite celebrity’s regrettable social media posts, data you give to a website, to outdated news stories, the internet has been a place where information is permanently inscribed. But, what if there were measures in place that allowed our digital footprints to be erased? Today, a hyper accurate data profile is not just created from your online activity, but also from the physical spaces you occupy. In the physical realm, data is aggregated via your smart doorbell, coffee machine, car, and phone. These devices by themselves, or in conjunction with other devices, are tracking when you wake up, leave the house, and when you return home. Meanwhile in the digital realm, your browsing history, app usage, and social media activity construct a parallel version of you, one that reflects your preferences, routines, relationships, and beliefs. Together, both of these data streams have created profiles of the average person that may be more comprehensive than the identities we present in real life. These profiles may infer personal characteristics or behaviors not consciously known to the individual, based on predictive analytics, through which various entities can profit off of as data becomes more valuable.
The European Union’s Stance on the Right to be Forgotten
In the European Union, the idea of the “Right to be Forgotten” became popular after the prominent, Google Inc. v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD),decision in 2014. The European Court of Justice held that under this concept, E.U. citizens have a right to remove or delete their personal information from search results, as well as from public record databases. In 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) codified a similar concept of “Right to be Forgotten” through Article 17, explicitly granting individuals the right to request removal of personal data and information from data brokers, websites, and search engine providers. Individuals could request erasure of their personal data when their consent was withdrawn, processing of their data was unlawful, or when that data was no longer necessary.
The United States’s Stance on the Right to be Forgotten
Unlike the E.U. the United States does not have a federal law in place ensuring a citizen’s online privacy and right to remove their data. At the state level, privacy laws are extremely limited. California has passed SB 568 also known as the “Eraser Law”, which grants minors the right to remove things that they themselves have posted online. However, this law does not ensure actual deletion of that post from the company’s servers, nor does it enable a minor to permanently delete any of their other data that company has collected.
One reason for the lack of privacy laws in the United States is the First Amendment, which makes passing laws allowing for the unpublishing of data or censoring certain search results on the internet challenging as it prevents the government from controlling speech or expression. Despite this, a 2019 survey of American citizens revealed that approximately 74% believe it is more important to keep personal information from being searchable online than to preserve data indefinitely.
Considering the risks of unfettered collection and use of our data, Americans need a law similar to that of the European Union. Federal legislation should be enacted that gives U.S citizens a clear right to remove their personal data from search engines and online services. While concerns about freedom of information are warranted, careful legislation can balance these concerns by limiting removal to private individuals and to information that has no public benefit. A federal “Right to be Forgotten” law would reaffirm the constitutional promise that power ultimately resides with the people restoring individual autonomy and privacy in an era where personal data is simply monetized and treated as a resource to be extracted.
On March 29th, the New Yankees beat the Milwaukee Brewers 20-9, hitting a franchise record nine home runs, including three home runs on the first three pitches of the game. However, the story that took the baseball world by storm was not the franchise’s single-game home-run record, or the three-game sweep in which the Yankees hit 15 home runs and scored 36 runs. Instead, the national spotlight was on the new bowling-pin shaped bats that several of the Yankees players were using. These bats, dubbed “torpedo bats” have dominated baseball news for the first two weeks of the season, and are likely to impact the intellectual property world as well.
What Are Torpedo Bats
Torpedo bats differ from regular bats because the part of the bat with the widest diameter is lower on the bat. The lower sweet spot is meant to distribute the most mass of the bat to the “sweet spot”. The rationale for this change was very simple: put more wood in the area where the ball usually hits the bat. In the words of MIT physicist Dr. David Pritchard, “When you look at the design of a classic baseball bat, the physics just don’t add up. When the ball comes in and hits the sweet spot, it bends the bat so some of the energy goes into bending the bat.” With more wood in the sweet spot, there will be less energy lost by the bat bending back.
Who Created the Torpedo Bat
Credit for the creation of the torpedo bat goes to another MIT physicist turned baseball coach, Aaron Leanhardt. Leanhardt is currently a field coordinator for the Miami Marlins but previously worked as a Minor League hitting coordinator for the Yankees. Before beginning his career as a coach, Leanhardt earned a PhD in physics from MIT and was a physics professor at the University of Michigan.
Leanhardt first began designing and testing the torpedo bat while working for the Yankees. In 2024, he first introduced the torpedo bat design to some Yankees players, including star hitter Giancarlo Stanton. There are even pictures of Stanton using a torpedo bat in the 2024 World Series. However, it was not until the opening weekend of the 2025 season, following the Yankees 3-game drubbing of the Milwaukee Brewers, when social media caught wind of the torpedo bats, and their popularity began to soar.
In the two weeks following the introduction of torpedo bats to the mainstream, baseball bat companies received thousands of preorders for torpedo bats. Two notable bat companies, Marucci and Victus, had models of the bats on their websites within a few days, trying to capitalize on the newest trend and had record sales.
The requests for torpedo bats are also coming from MLB teams themselves. Hillerich & Bradsby, the company that is credited for creating the Yankees’ torpedo bats, received an influx of orders from MLB teams directly asking for torpedo bat models. Within a few days, there were MLB players across the league using torpedo bats, and it will be interesting to see if their popularity continues to grow among players.
Can Torpedo Bats Be Patented
Whenever there is a popular new invention, one of the first questions is whether it is eligible to receive patent protection. Patents offer inventors “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” their invention in the United States. The two main types of patents available to inventors are utility patents and design patents. Utility patents are granted to inventors of new and useful processes or machines. Design patents are granted to inventors of new, original, and ornamental designs for an article of manufacturing.
Although the general shape of baseball bats has stayed nearly the same for over 100 years, there have been some modifications that have received patents. The first, and goofiest, example of these was the banana bat. Banana bats, which had a curved barrel, received a patent in 1890, despite not catching on in professional baseball (for obvious reasons).
Based on the axe bat precedent, it seems like torpedo bats could eventually receive a design patent. Interestingly, Bob Hillercih, the vice president of the aforementioned bat manufacturer Hillerich & Bradley, does not believe that torpedo bats are eligible for a patent because the changed design for the bat is just a change in the shape.
However, based on the description of design patents, this does not seem to be true.
There are two factors in determining whether a design qualifies for a design patent. First, the design must be an integral aspect of the product that cannot be separated. The difference in barrel placement is the integral aspect of the design of torpedo bat, so it appears that this element would be met. Next, the design must have no bearing on the item’s functionality. The torpedo bat design would likely meet this element, because the new design does not alter the baseball bat’s functionality. Rather, the torpedo bat just changes the amount of wood at the point of contact. Although some Yankee players had early success with the torpedo bats, it does not, on its own, make it easier to hit home runs. Torpedo bats are used just like regular baseball bats, the only difference is that it has a unique ornamentation with the location of the largest part of the ball being moved.
Design patents also require that the new patent not be obviously derived or resembling other designs. While there may be an argument that the torpedo bat resembles other bats, the same argument could have been used for the axe bat handle resembling a baseball bat handle or an axe handle. When viewing all of these elements, and comparing torpedo bats to the patent that the axe handle received, there is a possibility that torpedo bats could receive a design patent, if Leanhardt chooses to do so.
Conclusion
Time will tell if torpedo bats are the next big thing in baseball, or if they are just another banana bat. While more players have begun using them, other players tried them but returned to their old bats or refused to use them altogether. Regardless of their long-term impact on baseball, it will be very interesting to track whether the United States Patent and Trademark Office determines that torpedo bats can be patented. While historical precedent makes it seem like torpedo design can be patented, there seem to be concerns from people in the bat manufacturing business, who also may not want the bat design to be patented so they do not have to license the design to use it.
Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts 
