Intellectual property licenses were at the heart of two cases that Jerome Falk, Jr., of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, won in September in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. First, the court agreed with Falk that customers could not resell Autodesk, Inc., software, since the original software sale amounted to the grant of a nontransferable license. Next, Falk represented rapper Eminem’s former production company F.B.T. Productions, LLC, which sought bigger royalties on Eminem’s downloaded music under a 1998 contract that didn’t account for digital sales. Here Falk persuaded the court that downloads should have the same royalty rate as licensed music—50 percent—instead of the 12–20 percent paid on CD sales. “This ruling gives artists some pretty heavy ammunition,” he says.
Dealmaker in the Spotlight
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