The Motion Picture Association of America announced Thursday that it has hired STEVEN FABRIZIO, a Jenner & Block senior partner and cochair of the firm’s content, media and entertainment practice, as the trade group’s senior executive vice president and global general counsel.
Fabrizio—named one of the nation’s top copyright and trademark lawyers by affiliate publication The National Law Journal in April 2008—has served as lead outside counsel for the association and its member companies for many years. Among the matters he has handled for the MPAA: a copyright infringement suit filed against cloud-storage service Hotfile in February 2011. Fabrizio also had a hand in the association’s $110 million settlement with Canadian BitTorrent indexing site isoHunt, which resulted in the site shutting down in early October. (A clone site launched later in the month.)
In his new role, Fabrizio will oversee all of the MPAA’s legal, content protection and rights management programs. In a statement included in a press release announcing Fabrizio’s hiring, MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd said, “As the MPAA’s new global general counsel, he will continue to protect the rights of our industry’s creators and makers so they can do what they do best: tell stories that entertain audiences across the globe.”
For his part, Fabrizio acknowledged that protecting intellectual property involves plenty of litigation. At the same time, he said, “This position at MPAA is much broader than just litigation.” Fabrizio cited BitTorrent sites, cyberlockers and other unauthorized streaming websites as the main threats to the motion picture industry’s intellectual property these days. “The largest issue is creating a safe environment online for the media to distribute its content,” he said.
Fabrizio is slated to officially move into his new job in early December. And how will his former firm fare without him? “I would say five years ago I might have been crucial to Jenner & Block’s media and entertainment practice,” he said. Now, he said, Jenner has plenty of other key people, including “Ken Doroshow, Rick Stone and Andy Bart. The principle was not to build a practice around one person. I think the practice will continue without missing a step.”
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