Sports & Entertainment Beat

Welcome back and to those of you who celebrated a belated Happy St. Patrick’s Day. While I can’t promise that this installment of the Spotlight will be the “hair of the dog,” it should still make for a great accompaniment with your coffee(s). Without further ado, here is a sampling of what I found at the other end of the rainbow:

• • Former NFL greats (and momentary draft day teammates) Eli Manning and LaDainian Tomlinson are the latest big name athletes to get into the SPAC game, backing a $200 million blank check company in its pursuit of a consumer-oriented company that can leverage “influence driven purchases” and “talent as brands.”
  • Music streaming service SoundCloud appears to be experimenting with a new per-stream royalty structure, marking a deviation from the model favored by streaming giants Apple Music and Spotify. Pay-per-stream certainly seems like it could go a long way to provide transparency and allow more artists to garner meaningful streaming income.
  • The Non-fungible Token (NFT) market remains hot, with more influencers and institutional players adapting to take advantage of the new crypto opportunities in the sports, arts and entertainment world, while others sound the alarm on the viability of NFTs as an asset. Only time will tell whether we are witnessing a passing fad or a sign of things to come.
  • After a two-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments will be (fingers crossed) set in motion, and due to recent legislative developments in New Mexico and Maryland, it appears that at least some of the players and their fellow collegiate athletes will soon be able to be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). Until the ever-elusive federal legislation is passed, collegiate athletes (and the NCAA) will have to deal with a patchwork of laws and regulations in the near term.
    
    

Welcome back to another week in the Spotlight. It is truly remarkable to think that it has (already? only?) been one year since the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, shuttering sports arenas, film sets, theatres, concert venues and disrupting people’s way of life – that of course is nothing in comparison to the human toll of the disease. Still, the beat goes on…

At any rate, below is a sampling of some developments that caught my attention this week:

Greetings, and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Sports & Entertainment Spotlight series! The product of my unrequited desire for human interaction nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, this weekly feature will endeavor to bring readers up to speed on new, noteworthy and/or cutting-edge business and legal developments in the sports and entertainment industries. I hope you find it informative and fascinating, as I certainly do. If there are any topics you’d like to read more about, please feel free to let me know.

This week’s installment spotlights some noteworthy trends and developments, including:

With the Super Bowl coming up, it is important for brands looking to capitalize on football-themed promotions to remember that the terms “Super Bowl” and “Super Sunday” are registered trademarks guarded by the National Football League (NFL) more closely than a shutdown corner on a wide receiver. Because there is a fine line between permissible fair uses of Super Bowl and Super Sunday (e.g., in on-air banter and news and sports reports) and impermissible promotional uses that may infringe the NFL’s trademark, here are some guidelines to keep you from going “offsides:”