Welcome to the very first episode of THE SCREEN LAWYER™ Podcast! Make sure to tune in every other week on Wednesday for new episodes where we discuss #WhatsOnYourScreen and bring you valuable insights and tips.
In this episode, I'll be introducing myself and giving you a sneak peek of what you can expect in future episodes. From intellectual property protection and business contract structures to emerging technology and good old-fashioned storytelling and behind-the-scenes magic, we've got you covered. We'll also be bringing on guests, sharing real-life examples, and providing practical advice to help you take your content creation skills to the next level.
Thanks for tuning in!
Original Theme Song composed by Brent Johnson of Coolfire Studios.
Podcast sponsored by Capes Sokol.
Learn more about THE SCREEN LAWYER™ TheScreenLawyer.com.
Follow THE SCREEN LAWYER™ on social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheScreenLawyer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheScreenLawyer
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheScreenLawyer
Instagram: https://instagram.com/TheScreenLawyer
The Screen Lawyer’s hair by Shelby Rippy, Idle Hands Grooming Company.
Welcome to the very first episode of THE SCREEN LAWYER™ Podcast! Make sure to tune in every other week on Wednesday for new episodes where we discuss #WhatsOnYourScreen and bring you valuable insights and tips.
In this episode, I'll be introducing myself and giving you a sneak peek of what you can expect in future episodes. From intellectual property protection and business contract structures to emerging technology and good old-fashioned storytelling and behind-the-scenes magic, we've got you covered. We'll also be bringing on guests, sharing real-life examples, and providing practical advice to help you take your content creation skills to the next level.
Thanks for tuning in!
Original Theme Song composed by Brent Johnson of Coolfire Studios.
Podcast sponsored by Capes Sokol.
Learn more about THE SCREEN LAWYER™ TheScreenLawyer.com.
Follow THE SCREEN LAWYER™ on social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheScreenLawyer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheScreenLawyer
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheScreenLawyer
Instagram: https://instagram.com/TheScreenLawyer
The Screen Lawyer’s hair by Shelby Rippy, Idle Hands Grooming Company.
00;00;00;08 - 00;00;11;26
Narrator
The Screen Lawyer podcast is brought to you by Cape Sokol, Attorneys at law.
00;00;11;26 - 00;00;36;12
Pete Salsich III
Welcome to the Screen Lawyer Podcast. The intersection of the entertainment world, intellectual property law and emerging technology, where we discuss the legal and business issues surrounding any type of content that ends up on your screens. I’m your host, Pete Salsich, The Screen Lawyer.
00;00;38;18 - 00;01;08;24
Pete Salsich III
Hey there. How you doing? Pete Salsich, The Screen Lawyer. And here on the Screen Lawyer Podcast we're going to be talking about all things screens. Right. So what does that mean? What do we mean by the screen lawyer? Where did that term come from? Well, I really oh, my good friend Jim Hacking, the credit. And in my world, in the production world, credits key right attribution who's the created by well, maybe in a way Jim Hacking gets a co-created by credit for the screen lawyer because and I'll tell you how this happened.
00;01;09;05 - 00;01;40;11
Pete Salsich III
So in the course of my practice over the years, I have spent a lot of time doing intellectual property, legal work. I started as a litigator that started really with a comic book case more than 20 years ago that went on for years and years and developed all sorts of interesting law. But gradually grew into a practice that included music cases challenging, you know, Grammy nominated songs and their artists in the record labels because they didn't include my client in the credits because he had written the music.
00;01;41;01 - 00;02;03;19
Pete Salsich III
And then that evolved into cases involving tattoos and movies stuff. We're going to talk about in detail on this podcast and over this series as we go on. But what that really led me to was a point when I started to ask, Well, what do all these lawsuits have in common? And the thing that they had in common, everyone, some version of the lack of a piece of paper before there was money.
00;02;03;29 - 00;02;27;11
Pete Salsich III
And I began to realize, well, that's probably a pretty good practice in helping people avoid lawsuits by making sure that that paper is correct at the outset. So in the creative process, when things start, that is when it's most important to understand how intellectual property law affects what ends up on a screen, what the rights are, how it all works from a business perspective as well.
00;02;27;13 - 00;02;56;18
Pete Salsich III
So I began doing that work and I got the great good fortune of having a very small client at the time turn in to my only client and next thing you know I am in-house legal counsel at Cool Fire Studios and spent the next several years working on the software side, the television side, documentary films, digital production, emerging technologies, and doing all of the contracts and all of the right structures and helping the businesses form in order to do that work.
00;02;56;18 - 00;03;19;19
Pete Salsich III
And when I came out of the in-house version of Go Fi Studios, who are still great friends and clients, but now I'm doing this work for a much broader audience, and I was struggling with how to describe my practice. You know, one of the things that we have to do is lawyers is we've got to do what I'm doing right now is talk to you and tell you what I do and what I'm interested in.
00;03;19;19 - 00;03;43;06
Pete Salsich III
And so you can make decisions. People have to decide what I like to work with this lawyer. And so some part of that is branding. And those of you in the audience who branding is your thing. Well, we're going to have some episodes on branding and some cool issues in intellectual property that come up with that. But I was thinking about that for myself, Well, how do I tell people that I can do this stuff because it's different than what I once did now?
00;03;43;09 - 00;04;01;19
Pete Salsich III
And so I was having lunch with my friend Jim, who if you don't know Jim, check out Jim's YouTube channel Hacking immigration law. He's a total leader in the in the YouTube for lawyers world. And Jim's also a great friend and I was trying to describe my struggle to him and kept saying, he's like, well, what do you do?
00;04;01;19 - 00;04;18;05
Pete Salsich III
And I would go, blah, blah. And we blur and he stop, What do you do? And then I would struggle some more. And finally he just kept saying, What do you do? And I thought to myself for a second, Well, a cool fire they used to have a saying, We make things for screens. And I did every one of those contracts.
00;04;18;05 - 00;04;34;22
Pete Salsich III
I did every one of those deals, every one of those right structures, every one of those businesses, every one of those disputes. And Jim said, you're a screen lawyer. Light bulb went off. We checked, the URL was available and the screen lawyer was born. So, Jim, thank you. I will never forget the fact that you gave me this platform.
00;04;34;27 - 00;04;54;08
Pete Salsich III
I really mean that. But now what? So what do we do with the screen lawyer? Well, we're going to talk about how things get on your screen, how they stay there. And I don't mean just the production. And we will do that. We will have guests here who talk about the making. You know, the concept of makers is is very cool these days.
00;04;54;08 - 00;05;20;08
Pete Salsich III
It's always been cool, of course. I mean, people who make and build and things are inspirational. And for those of us who can't really make talking about makers is the next closest thing. So we're going to have those people on. But other than the makers of how something physically gets on the screen, I'm more interested in focusing on the legal aspects of how something can end up on a screen and more importantly, how it can stay there and how people can make money on it.
00;05;20;08 - 00;05;48;21
Pete Salsich III
If that's the goal. Do you realize that whether it's a $100 million movie or a 32nd toothpaste commercial or anything in between the legal rights, the contract structure, copyright law, perhaps how you're paying all of those rights are identical for both projects. Now, some will have more pieces than others, but copyright law functions exactly the same for every single thing that ends up on a screen.
00;05;49;00 - 00;06;07;17
Pete Salsich III
You have to have the rights to everything, go second to footage in order to put it up on the screen in the way you want to use it. And there's of course, there are variations depending on the nature of the use or where your distributing. And you may need a different set of rights or you may have a little more freedom depending on certain factors.
00;06;07;27 - 00;06;29;09
Pete Salsich III
We'll talk about those things, but that's the kind of stuff we want to dig into about how do you pay for something on a screen? How does a film get financed? We'll talk about that. How do things get made? Remember, those guys were those really cool people who are makers? Well, now we have artificial intelligence. A.I. Chad Beatty in a million other seems like a million.
00;06;29;09 - 00;06;57;05
Pete Salsich III
Now. Other sources of A.I. generated content. It's really cool. It's amazing. And it's happening fast, as you know. But the law doesn't move fast. Copyright law doesn't change much at all over time, nor does contract law or patent law, for example, or even trade secret law. My point is, even though the technology is new, if it's going to end up on a screen, the same legal rules apply.
00;06;57;12 - 00;07;20;22
Pete Salsich III
And AI is creating some very, very interesting situations that don't easily fit into past legal structures in the courts. You're going to have to figure that stuff out. We're going to dig in and explore that stuff. Who owns the output of something that's created by A.I.? What's legal for training? And I can you go get stuff from other people to use stuff like that.
00;07;20;22 - 00;07;36;25
Pete Salsich III
And many more. So that'll be one of the things that we're going to focus on in for something like A.I.. The intention here is we're going to do a series. We can't cover that in one episode in any kind of a detail. So I'm going to dig in and focus on some different aspects. I don't know how many episodes that'll be.
00;07;37;01 - 00;07;53;23
Pete Salsich III
That'll be part of the fun. And if something new happens, we'll come back at later and revisit and we're going to have some other things that will end up being series like that. We may have multiple episodes focusing on different aspects of a certain area of the law or certain area of technology or just things that are happening in the entertainment world.
00;07;54;06 - 00;08;10;26
Pete Salsich III
But breaking up the series, we want to tell some stories. I want to hear from other people, not just me. Now, I may be the one talking to you a lot, and hopefully they'll there'll be value there because I got a lot to say, honest with you. But I want to hear from other people. I want to talk to creators.
00;08;10;26 - 00;08;27;15
Pete Salsich III
I want to talk to makers. I want to talk to people who are using A.I.. I'm going to talk to students who are just getting into this world. When I talk to people who've been doing it for years, maybe a little blown away by the new technology and how they deal with it, we'll talk to other lawyers. Perhaps there's a wide list of people we'll talk to.
00;08;27;15 - 00;08;43;25
Pete Salsich III
I want to talk to some of the former clients maybe who were part of these lawsuits that were so much fun and kind of cool. Maybe they weren't fun for the client at the time. But now looking back at them, I think they were pretty much fun. And speaking of lawsuits, we'll have some episodes devoted to lawsuits. You know, I get asked a lot.
00;08;43;25 - 00;09;09;17
Pete Salsich III
One of the coolest things I ever got to do was represent a tattoo artist and take on a Hollywood blockbuster the week before Memorial Day because the studio didn't get permission to copy the tattoo from one famous person's face to another famous person's face. That was our case. It was a blast. Tell you all about it. Other cases, music cases, comic books.
00;09;09;17 - 00;09;34;03
Pete Salsich III
I got my whole start in this intellectual property area. As a comic book lawyer, I know it sounds kind of funny. I wasn't actually drawn as a lawyer in the comic book, but the lawsuit was about the use of characters and names and identities in the comic book. On the characters ended up going on for years, developing new law and certain areas, appellate courts weighing in, but led to different licensing issues.
00;09;34;12 - 00;10;03;15
Pete Salsich III
And now the name image Likeness now is such a big deal in the college athletic world and elsewhere. It's kind of wild to me because this comic book lawsuit that was my very first intellectual property case was a name image, likeness lawsuit More than 20 years ago. We called it the right of publicity, which is the legal term for the right to control the use of your name, image and likeness for endorsement purposes.
00;10;03;21 - 00;10;22;23
Pete Salsich III
But that's what it was. This issue isn't new. And maybe that's the point. And one of the things I think we'll spend some time with, the more we have new technology, the more they are emerging things. You know, this these screens that we hold in our hands, they're ubiquitous now, right? Everybody has one. But some of us have multiple.
00;10;22;23 - 00;10;49;27
Pete Salsich III
Many of us have more. But it isn't that long ago where that was amazing. New technology, just like air is now. It's like other things have been in the past. But the more things change, the more they are the same that old cliche is absolutely true here. And so while name, image, likeness seems like this exploded new thing, it's actually a long, well-established legal right with lots of precedent.
00;10;49;27 - 00;11;14;28
Pete Salsich III
And we'll talk about that. And maybe sometimes we can get you some comfort level dealing with this new stuff because you realize that the underlying principles, whether it's for your business or you're a rights, you know, you're the creator or you want to use somebody else's creation in something you're doing, those rules don't change. Those rules evolve to meet the new technology.
00;11;14;28 - 00;11;37;24
Pete Salsich III
But mostly the lawyers kind of have to do the combination. You know, the way we make arguments often in the legal world is we try to say, if I'm if I want a certain outcome, I want to say to the court, Your Honor, my situation is just like this other case over here. And in this other case, the rule turned out this way.
00;11;37;24 - 00;11;58;26
Pete Salsich III
Therefore, the rules should turn out that way for me today. But my opponent is going to say, Oh, Your Honor, this case isn't the current issue, is it like bad case? It's really like this one over here and in this one over here, the result was the opposite. Therefore, the opposite result should happen. Now it's basic only. Are we comparing apples to apples?
00;11;59;06 - 00;12;28;21
Pete Salsich III
What questions do we ask? What is the right way to frame the issue? That's what we do a lot as lawyers, and that's what we have to explore when we're dealing with new technology. Cycling Back to the discussion from earlier, maybe many of these issues that seem like they're new because of the way AI is helping generate new content are actually issues that the courts have dealt with in the past under the copyright law, but under a slightly different situation.
00;12;29;00 - 00;12;57;29
Pete Salsich III
It'll be interesting to see, but that's the kind of thing we're going to explore. So over the course of hopefully many episodes of the Screen Lawyer podcast, we're going to talk about things like that. And we have a plan, right? I've got already a bunch of episodes planned out. We're going to do series, We're going to have guests, but we're also going to be flexible and be creative because one of the coolest thing I think about working with creative people is just that their ability to be flexible, to be creative problem solvers.
00;12;58;10 - 00;13;24;02
Pete Salsich III
And I saw this really, really come true during COVID when that pandemic hit, productions all over the world just shut down and people were panicked like, How are we ever going to make a movie again, let alone a television commercial or any version in between, anything that required people to come together on a daily basis from different backgrounds, different places they live, etc., travel in for a day for a shoot.
00;13;24;12 - 00;13;45;26
Pete Salsich III
That world all had to be completely reimagined. But you know who got back to business? Probably quicker than a lot of other industries, production companies because they've always been creative problem solvers. No matter what you have on the shooting schedule that day, you have to be willing to adjust. Maybe the lighting turns out to be different, or maybe it's a much bigger issue.
00;13;46;04 - 00;14;19;10
Pete Salsich III
The point is they're always solving problems in the minute, and that's what I try to do here, if we can. So if you like what you heard so far, subscribe, find us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're watching this on our YouTube channel, hit like and hit that subscribe button down below. And that way you'll always know when we have a new episode, we intend to launch some every other week, maybe more often once in a while, if something is breaking, but for sure on a regular basis so we can continue to explore what I think is just about the coolest area in the world these days.
00;14;19;10 - 00;14;38;13
Pete Salsich III
And that's the creative world and the creative world now. It lives on our screens and so The Screen Lawyer seems like the right person to be talking about it. I hope you talk to you soon. I'll be. Have a great day.
00;14;38;13 - 00;14;57;12
Pete Salsich III
You've been listening to The Screen Lawyer Podcast with your host Pete Salsich, The Screen Lawyer. For more information or to stay connected, find us on social @thescreenlawyer or check us out at TheScreenLawyer.com