The following is an interview between our Business Development Manager, Allys Benitez (AB), and Eric Goldman (EG), a distinguished legal expert specializing in entertainment and technology. With over 30 years of experience, Eric has represented a diverse range of clients, including Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award winners. His notable projects include working with the writers of the international hit musical Come From Away, handling international licensing for YouTube sensation Blippi, and serving as outside counsel for streaming service BroadwayHD.
Eric’s practice spans private placement financings, intellectual property and the integration of entertainment with technology. Additionally, he has expanded his services to include mediation and coaching, enhancing his ability to support his clients. In this interview, Allys and Eric delve into his extensive career, discuss the evolving intersections of entertainment and technology, and explore his insights on the future of these dynamic fields.
AB: What first attracted you to technology and entertainment?
EG: I have this running joke that everything I know about life I learned from Star Trek. I know that’s probably not what people want to hear from a lawyer, but in my case it happens to be true. When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by stories and storytellers, and one of the best examples of that was Star Trek. I was just really drawn by the way the creators of that show used technology to raise challenging questions and to tell really thought-provoking stories. I think one of the reasons that property has endured for so long is that they have been willing to say “This technology exists, it’s impacting us this way, and what does that mean for the human experience?” It really drew me in, and that was kind of the genesis, and ever since I’ve been drawn to people who use technology to tell stories and use technology to kind of challenge the status quo.
AB: From the start of your career until now, how has that evolved, and how have these fields evolved, because I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes within that time.
EG: When I started out – My first job out of law school was working for a copyright guru named Stanley Rothenberg. Stanley had the distinction of losing a very famous legal case. It was the Maytime decision, and it was a decision about whether or not a film could be distributed on television. Stanley lost the case because the contract didn’t specifically mention television distribution rights, and so law was made, and now it’s kind of standard practice that when you are doing a grant of rights you always include the language “in any and all media now known or devised hereafter” so that you don’t fall into the trap that Stanley fell into with his client. I started out as a researcher for Stanley writing research memos and stayed there for a couple of years and over time I just kind of gravitated to different things. I wanted to have more client contact; I wanted to be much more integrally involved in the process of lawyering and that’s what I ended up doing. At this point, research is not the primary thing that I do because I’ve done enough research that I kind of know the parameters of what I’m talking about. A lot of what I do is client-facing, understanding what the client’s goals are and developing a plan for them to achieve their goals, navigate pitfalls, and be successful.
AB: Would you say that it’s more complex now or less complex than it was at the beginning when you first started in that field?
EG: My personal opinion is that it’s not more complex. I have had the experience of seeing new uses and new technologies emerge over the course of my career, and the way that you approach those new technologies and those new uses is relatively constant. So, what am I talking about? I am old enough that I can remember a time before rap was popular, and I can remember a time before sampling in music was popular. I can remember the legal issues that were presented when artists started sampling other artists in their work and how the lawyers went crazy, and the businesspeople sat down and worked it out. That was kind of a fascinating process to see how that evolved. Now it’s standard practice that if you’re sampling a song in your song, you give a medley credit. I’ve seen the emergence of CD-ROMs, back when CD-ROMs were a thing. I’ve seen the emergence of smartphones. I’ve seen the emergence of social media, and it’s always kind of the same analysis. What does this new technology mean for intellectual property protection? How do I succeed in this new media while protecting my intellectual property assets, and how do I avoid infringing other people’s rights? So, it doesn’t get more complex, it becomes a way of life to adapt to these emerging technologies and emerging forms of media.
AB: I want to talk about how you got to IBL and what your role is here.
EG: Alexander Rodriguez, who is one of the founding partners, recruited me. He found me on LinkedIn. He liked the kind of work that I did, and I liked him, and I liked Aaron Krowne, the other founding partner, and I liked the idea of a distributed law firm. It wasn’t something that I had seen before. We started to work on some projects, and originally, we were going full into the crypto universe. We were going to be a crypto law firm; we were going to help clients navigate the crypto landscape, and then the business went into what is referred to as a crypto winter, and business activity in that sphere kind of slowed, and so we started to talk about other things that we could do, and one of the things we talked about was starting an intellectual property group at IBL. Let’s expand into different technologies, different media, and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re having a lot of fun with it.
AB: I want to talk about the convergence of technology and entertainment and how you see those fields merging with intellectual property and AI and how that may evolve.
EG: All that’s an interesting question. I will say this; this is what I tell clients all the time. Any business or any industry that has resisted the emergence of a new technology has disappeared. Movie studios were very unhappy when people started buying video recorders, and they went to court to try and stop it. Record stores were very unhappy with online distribution of music, and they tried to stop it. The industries that resisted the change were swept away. As a general rule, I always tell people that this is happening; there’s no point in fighting it; you’re going to have to make your peace with it, find a way to make it work for you, and find a way to succeed. It’s just a particular approach that I have adopted that I have helped people find success with. Is technology merging with entertainment more than it has before? I don’t know historically that I agree with that. Like I said before, I have seen technologies come and go. Books went to CD-ROM and to Kindle, and now most people read their books online or have them read to them in an audiobook, and that’s been going on for a long time. A lot of people have stopped watching movies in movie theaters because they are able to recreate really high-quality movie experiences in their own homes. Is that radical? If you ever read Fahrenheit 451, that’s kind of a presage, people having TV screens on every wall of their house and having interactive experiences with entertainment properties. So, I don’t know that it’s gotten more complex. AI is very interesting because that’s presented some new challenges. One, getting copyright protection for works created by AI is not fully possible right now; getting patent protection for innovations created by AI is not fully possible right now. There needs to be some human involvement in the creative process, in the innovative process, for the Federal government to grant protection to work, and that’s going to be kind of fascinating to watch. It’s also going to be very fascinating to watch what happens as more and more creators find ways to stop AI companies from using their work to train AI products. As more and more people pull their intellectual property from data sets that companies can use to train their products. My personal fear is that the more we force AI to be trained on public domain materials, the more we limit what AI can produce to being grounded on the works of dead white men. We’ve all seen what the limitations are when your creative universe is limited to the output of dead white men.
AB: I want to go back to what you said about copyrighting AI and how it’s not possible right now. How far do you think we are from it being copyrighted?
EG: I don’t know that it’s ever going to happen. I mean what you can do right now is let’s say you write a book, and you do some research, and you put inputs into AI, and AI feeds you back some information, and you incorporate that information into your book. You would have to disclose to the copyright office that AI helped in the creation of this work, and you would have to exclude the work product of the AI system from copyright protection, and I don’t know that that’s going to change.
AB: I can imagine that it’s something that people are constantly trying to make happen because so much is moving so quickly in that world. I’m sure they’re going to try and put up a fight. But who knows if it’s actually going to get done eventually.
EG: I think that there are vocal advocates on both sides of that conversation, and we’ll have to see.
AB: Are there any other innovative tools that are currently transforming how AI impacts licensing and distribution for intellectual property?
EG: I think AI is so new that everything is relatively innovative. Certainly, the interfaces are more intuitive; they are also everywhere, there’s really no way to escape interacting with AI. I think that the pendulum is swinging in favor of AI right now. I don’t know how long it’s going to last. I know that many people get very frustrated when they want to get someone on the phone to help them and they’re forced to deal with an AI agent that’s just not capable of handling robust conversation. So, I think that everything is kind of new right now. Nothing is truly settled, and we all just have to see how it plays out. We’re all talking about how the algorithms are selecting what you see in your social media feed, how the algorithms are selecting what Netflix tells you “This is something that you would like,” and we’re going to have to see how successful those can be and what is going to be the upper limit of what AI can do without human guidance.
AB: I think everyone’s kind of on edge trying to see what’s next for AI. There’s all this great stuff out there, but what is the ceiling for it?
EG: I will tell you, the use of AI that I found the most inspiring. Somehow, I don’t know how I found out, that there was a new John Lennon song. I know it’s not physically possible for there to be a new John Lennon song for obvious reasons, but what had happened was that John Lennon had recorded a demo of a song, and he recorded it by putting a portable tape recorder on top of his piano and playing the song and singing a song. There was background noise, so the recording was not commercially viable. What AI was able to do was take that recording, separate out the piano line from the vocal line, and then, using other vocal recordings of John Lennon, enhance the vocal recording so that it was recognizable as John Lennon and make this song or recording of this song of a quality high enough to be released. I thought that was really innovative and I hadn’t really thought of that kind of use for AI.
AB: I think that always goes back to the conflict that people have with social media. Does it produce more good than bad? It could be used for both. It always goes back to that conversation.
EG: I mean, certainly when you’re using AI for deepfakes, when you’re using AI to create performances of performers who are no longer with us, that is questionable practice, and people have concerns about it. I know they’ve done it with Tupac Shakur, they’ve done it with Frank Sinatra, and I know they’ve done it with Michael Jackson, but this I think is kind of in a different category. It reminded me of the people whose job it is to restore the paintings of old masters. It was a restoration as opposed to a replacement or competition.
AB: It lets it live on, but in a way that’s more natural and not like you’re trying to replace what was there before. I want to talk about an article that you recently wrote for the IBL website where you highlighted the importance of protecting IT for startups, covering their copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. How should startups prioritize those protections in the early stages? And what’s most important to you?
EG: There’s an old joke that to a hammer everything looks like a nail. To an intellectual property lawyer, all of your intellectual property should be a priority. So I may be the wrong person to ask because you’re going to get a skewed answer from me, but I will tell you that in our marketplace today, where everything is so dependent on social media and so dependent on brand awareness, to not make sure that your brand name is something that you can actually register and protect, to not make sure that the product that you’re developing is something that you fully own the rights to, can be a very costly mistake. I think this is something I always encourage people to pay attention to, these issues. Make sure you have the proper agreements in place for everybody working on your project. Make sure you have the proper licenses in place with everything that you are using to develop your own product. Make sure that the name you’re picking is not being used by somebody else and is eligible for protection because why get very far down the road and realize you have to regroup and rebrand before you even launch?
AB: Would you say out of the common mistakes you see startups make that probably one of the biggest is that they don’t check for that beforehand?
EG: I would say the saddest conversation I have had to have with people is when I tell them, listen, this name that you want to use, I did a Google search, I did a trademark search, and I don’t think it’s available, and if it is available, I don’t think it’s protectable, so I don’t think it’s the best choice for you. At that point they’ve probably invested in logos and product design, and maybe they’ve been talking to potential sources of financing, and to have to rework that and say, “Hey, we kind of skipped this very basic step”; it’s a bad look in addition to being costly and time consuming. Having to tell people that the name that you’ve been using you can’t use anymore—that’s really one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.
AB: It’s unfortunate because with something as simple as a Google search, a small step, but that can change so much and avoid a bigger issue later on. So, I’m looking ahead and want to talk about emerging trends, technology, and IP. Is there anything that you’re most excited about?
EG: One of the things I would really like to be doing more of is looking at cryptocurrency and NFTs as part of project finance. Most entertainment projects are financed through a securities offering, a private placement. You can also do that private placement using a proprietary coin or cryptocurrency. You can also incorporate a non-fungible token, an NFT, into that offering, and that does a couple of things. One, it allows for your investors to be part of a conversation because maybe the coins would have some ability to vote on certain issues; another thing that it does is really build better CRMS, client relations management, because you’re giving somebody an asset that they can only get from you; and third, the coin, the NFT, may develop value on its own, separate and apart from any profits that they may see from the entertainment property itself. From my point, it would be really interesting to start developing those systems for people. When you say to people, “Hey, you’re a Broadway fanatic, and you have a collection of Broadway playbills going back 50 years, it’s your pride and joy, so obviously you understand that people like to collect these things. Why wouldn’t you want to create a new class of collectible that could have value on its own down the road?” That’s something I’d really like to get involved with.
AB: Before you go, we do have a question, we want to ask kind of a more personal question. Are there any hobbies or interests that you have outside of the legal field that you’re passionate about?
EG: It’s interesting. I don’t talk about this a lot in a professional context. A lot of people don’t know that I’m a single father. I adopted my daughter who is now going to be 21 in October. So that has been a very big part of my life. I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve chosen a career that has allowed me to be a full-time lawyer and a full-time dad. I also have a spiritual practice that is deeply meaningful to me. I’m involved in a lot of interfaith activities so outside of the office I do have a pretty full personal life that gives me a lot of joy.
AB: Thank you so much for sharing that we really appreciate you opening up, sharing more about your experience, your personal life and also your work life. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
