Brand & New
Brand & New is a podcast produced by the International Trademark Association (INTA) and focused on innovation. Published monthly, each episode consists of an open dialogue with experts, visionaries, and influential people from all over the world in order to learn more about the evolution of the legal and intellectual property ecosystem, its concepts, and all actual or potential consequences. Because we consider innovation as a pillar of INTA’s Strategic Plan, and because it is key to “walk the talk,” we invite you to follow Brand & New, to expand your knowledge about the transformation of this industry and to stay curious! Brand & New guests contribute to this podcast in their personal capacity and the opinions expressed (or experiences shared) are their own. They do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of INTA or its members.
Brand & New
When Music Meets IP: A Conversation with Mei-lan Stark and Rick McMurtry
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
As AI-generated music floods the market, the music industry faces unprecedented questions about creativity, copyright, and compensation. But behind every evolving technology and headline debate are the lawyers, often musicians themselves, who navigate the space where art and law converge.
In this episode of Brand & New, guest host Rudy Gaines sits down with two leading intellectual property practitioners whose personal and professional lives are deeply connected to music: INTA Past President Mei-lan Stark, Executive Vice President and Chief Counsel for IP at NBCUniversal (USA) and Rick McMurtry, Founding Partner at M|C Law Group (USA).
From childhood music lessons to high-stakes licensing negotiations, both guests share how their lifelong connection to music has shaped their careers, protecting creative works. Together, they trace the soundtrack of the industry’s evolution, from the era of Napster to today’s AI-driven soundscapes, exploring how innovation challenges what it means to be both creator and protector.
This episode was recorded live during INTA’s 2025 Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.
Resources:
Related Brand & New Episodes:
Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker 1
Hello there, this is Rudy Gaines.
00:00:05 Speaker 1
I'm the guest host for today's episode of Brandon New, which I'd never listened to before.
00:00:09 Speaker 1
They asked me to do this, but now I'm a big fan.
00:00:12 Speaker 1
So if you haven't checked it out, you should.
00:00:13 Speaker 1
Really entertaining.
00:00:15 Speaker 1
Today we're actually recording this from the annual meeting in San Diego, right in the middle of the exhibition hall.
00:00:21 Speaker 1
Lots of folks moving past here.
00:00:23 Speaker 1
You know, it was a great week.
00:00:25 Speaker 1
My voice is now 2 oxfords lower and I sound like Barry White, but
00:00:30 Speaker 1
Which is a great segue into our theme today, which is music and IP, but with a question.
00:00:35 Speaker 1
So here it is.
00:00:37 Speaker 1
Musicians are always spoken about as artists.
00:00:40 Speaker 1
You know, they create their music.
00:00:42 Speaker 1
It's their way of expressing how they look at the world.
00:00:45 Speaker 1
But what about lawyers?
00:00:48 Speaker 1
Can lawyers be artists too?
00:00:50 Speaker 1
You know, in ancient Rome,
00:00:52 Speaker 1
The law was defined as the art of the good and the equal, right?
00:00:56 Speaker 1
In modern times, it's been called the useful art, along with architecture.
00:00:59 Speaker 1
So certainly there are virtuoso attorneys out there who follow their instincts and communicate to their clients and juries in a way that goes beyond just the nuts and bolts of law.
00:01:10 Speaker 1
So for all you attorneys out there, have you ever considered yourself an artist of the law?
00:01:16 Speaker 1
Can a lawyer be a legal artist?
00:01:18 Speaker 1
To help us explore that question are a couple of folks who've dabbled in a little of their own.
00:01:23 Speaker 1
They've dropped by to talk to us about their relationship to music, both personally and professionally as IP attorneys.
00:01:28 Speaker 1
So please welcome Milan Stark of NBC Universal and Rick McMurtry of MC Law Group and the former lead counsel for Warner Music.
00:01:38 Speaker 1
Welcome you guys.
00:01:39 Speaker 2
Thank you.
00:01:39 Speaker 3
It makes it super easy because you guys know each other so well.
00:01:43 Speaker 4
We are very close friends and have been for 20 plus years.
00:01:47 Speaker 1
So I'm just going to turn off the mic and let you guys talk.
00:01:51 Speaker 1
So for the 10 people out there who don't know you guys, I thought I'd run down your bios just really quickly.
00:01:56 Speaker 3
I'll start with you, Milan, Executive Vice President, Chief Counsel IP at NBC Universal.
00:02:01 Speaker 3
She oversees 100 strong global IP protection team.
00:02:07 Speaker 3
Their group supports Universal Studios, Focus, DreamWorks Animation, and the broadcast and cable television business as well.
00:02:14 Speaker 3
NBC, Telemundo, USA, Sci-Fi, Bravo, Cable, the news division, NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, and also sports, Golf Channel, NBC Sports.
00:02:26 Speaker 3
Good Lord.
00:02:28 Speaker 3
Outside of NBC Universal, Milan is
00:02:33 Speaker 3
I'm the chair of the Global Innovation Policy Center.
00:02:39 Speaker 3
She's on the board for the U.S.
00:02:40 Speaker 3
Chamber of Commerce.
00:02:42 Speaker 3
And she also served as a member and vice president of the National Trustees of the National Symphony Orchestra, affiliated with the Kennedy Center, which we're going to talk about a little bit, too.
00:02:52 Speaker 3
Milan was appointed Secretary of Commerce to serve on the Trademark Public Advisory Committee for the USPTO from 2016 to 2018.
00:03:00 Speaker 3
As we all know, she was the president of
00:03:03 Speaker 3
INTA.
00:03:03 Speaker 3
We started to get the picture that Milan has a clone.
00:03:07 Speaker 3
So, or a doppelganger.
00:03:09 Speaker 3
I don't know which.
00:03:10 Speaker 3
How do you do all this stuff?
00:03:11 Speaker 2
Well, Tosu does half of it.
00:03:15 Speaker 3
And I knew I shouldn't have been this with you.
00:03:19 Speaker 3
And Rick is her friend.
00:03:24 Speaker 3
But, you know, tucked down in the very bottom of your bio, it says, Milan was also assistant principal cellist in the Los Angeles.
00:03:32 Speaker 3
Lawyers Philharmonic Orchestra for a number of years.
00:03:35 Speaker 3
And that's where music enters the picture.
00:03:37 Speaker 3
And I think what you've done is cloned your doppelganger.
00:03:41 Speaker 3
And Rick, we were just talking about this, hard act to follow, but if anybody can, it's you.
00:03:46 Speaker 3
Like I said, MC Law Group was just started, and AI, advertising, IP, and music, legal matters.
00:03:54 Speaker 3
Prior to founding MC Law Group, Rick worked in-house for over 24 years at Warner Brothers Discovery and its predecessor companies.
00:04:02 Speaker 3
He served as chief IP counsel, SVP of music, legal and business affairs, head of commercial clearance, global head of IP policy.
00:04:10 Speaker 3
That's just 1/4 century worth of daunting stuff.
00:04:13 Speaker 3
It's A lot.
00:04:13 Speaker 3
It's A lot.
00:04:14 Speaker 3
I can't wait to hear about it.
00:04:16 Speaker 3
At home, Rick lives in Atlanta now in Georgia with his husband, Randall.
00:04:22 Speaker 3
They have two sons, Ryan and Jake.
00:04:23 Speaker 3
Three dogs, Darby, Lucy, Violet, 2 bunnies, Cinnabon and Cookie, a few chickens.
00:04:29 Speaker 3
Outside of his practice,
00:04:31 Speaker 3
anytime there's a mic or a stage involved, and even when there's not.
00:04:34 Speaker 3
Rick is not shy about belting a tune or doing his best to get a laugh.
00:04:37 Speaker 3
And I've seen you do presentations and they're thoroughly entertaining.
00:04:41 Speaker 3
And somebody needs to hire you to be a keynote speaker.
00:04:43 Speaker 3
So anybody out there, keynote.
00:04:46 Speaker 3
And the cool thing, as I said, is you guys know each other, so you're making my job very easy.
00:04:49 Speaker 3
And if you have questions for Rick, or Rick, if you have questions for Elon, just jump in and hit it and I'll stay out of the way.
00:04:57 Speaker 3
But we'd like to start with the personals.
00:04:59 Speaker 3
first and your relationships to music.
00:05:01 Speaker 3
Milan, train cellists from a child, were you the kid with the calluses on the fingers?
00:05:06 Speaker 2
Yeah, I was the kid with the calluses on the fingers.
00:05:08 Speaker 2
I actually started on piano when I was 7.
00:05:10 Speaker 2
And then I took up cello as my second instrument when I was 8.
00:05:15 Speaker 2
And I did it even decently, seriously through high school.
00:05:20 Speaker 2
And, you know, music is one of those careers where you have to make a decision at an age where nobody should be determining what they're going to do for their life, about whether
00:05:28 Speaker 2
You have the dedication and the talent to make it all the way.
00:05:31 Speaker 2
So I would say early high school, I had it in my mind that I might want to really pursue cello seriously.
00:05:38 Speaker 2
And my mother kind of had a real hard conversation with me, which is like, kid, you're not the girl who gets up at 5 A.m.
00:05:45 Speaker 2
and practices for two hours before you go to high school.
00:05:47 Speaker 2
I don't think that you've got what it takes.
00:05:51 Speaker 2
And so it just became a lifelong hobby.
00:05:53 Speaker 2
But I've been fortunate in that different stages of my life.
00:05:56 Speaker 2
I've been able to find
00:05:58 Speaker 2
great orchestras to play with, and it's always kept it as something that I love to do.
00:06:03 Speaker 3
Didn't you play here at INTA one time?
00:06:05 Speaker 2
I did.
00:06:06 Speaker 2
That was, I was cajoled by J.
00:06:08 Speaker 2
Scott.
00:06:10 Speaker 2
I missed a play just in advance of his opening ceremony.
00:06:15 Speaker 3
It was, she was fabulous.
00:06:17 Speaker 3
Wait, just fabulous.
00:06:18 Speaker 4
How did I miss that?
00:06:19 Speaker 4
I remember J.
00:06:20 Speaker 4
Scott's opening speech.
00:06:21 Speaker 4
He sang.
00:06:23 Speaker 4
during his opening speech.
00:06:24 Speaker 4
And I was like, oh, that gives me permission to sing during mine the following year.
00:06:28 Speaker 2
Which was fantastic.
00:06:29 Speaker 4
Oh, thank you.
00:06:30 Speaker 2
And I do remember when we were in Florida, there was a whole karaoke night that was like the INTA closing ceremonies or something.
00:06:38 Speaker 2
And you were up on stage singing event too.
00:06:40 Speaker 2
It was worse.
00:06:41 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:06:41 Speaker 3
And the first time I heard you sing was Atlanta last year.
00:06:44 Speaker 3
There was a piano bar that you sang.
00:06:45 Speaker 3
And what a set of pipes you've got.
00:06:47 Speaker 3
Thank you.
00:06:48 Speaker 3
So
00:06:50 Speaker 3
Did you, were there lessons?
00:06:52 Speaker 3
Was there rehearsals?
00:06:52 Speaker 3
Did you, were in musicals?
00:06:54 Speaker 3
Was there a theatrical career somewhere back in there?
00:06:56 Speaker 4
There was, dreams of one.
00:07:00 Speaker 4
So, you know, I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee.
00:07:03 Speaker 4
So you're surrounded by music.
00:07:05 Speaker 4
You know, my first television production was Hee Haw.
00:07:09 Speaker 3
I remember Hee Haw.
00:07:11 Speaker 4
Yes.
00:07:11 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:07:12 Speaker 4
Hee Haw, Charlie McCoy and the Hee Haw Band.
00:07:14 Speaker 4
Charlie McCoy happened to be my sister's softball coach.
00:07:17 Speaker 4
So he got us.
00:07:19 Speaker 4
onto the set of Hee Haw for when I was probably about 7 or 8 years old.
00:07:22 Speaker 4
But most Southern boys, my first foray into music was church, church music.
00:07:28 Speaker 4
We were singing hymns and I was in the youth choir and I was very involved in that and went on to college and I ended up going to a school renowned for its music program, Belmont University in Nashville.
00:07:42 Speaker 4
Not for music, but because my mom said I could go to a Christian school in town, not David Lipscomb and not Trevecca, and that left one school.
00:07:49 Speaker 4
So that's where I went.
00:07:51 Speaker 3
So moms, I get a mom theme going here.
00:07:54 Speaker 4
Yes, oh yeah, I've got a similar story to Milan.
00:07:56 Speaker 4
So at Belmont, I really fell in love with musical theater and was in a bunch of musical theater productions.
00:08:05 Speaker 4
I was Barnaby Tucker and Hello Dolly and Seymour and Little Shop of Horrors.
00:08:09 Speaker 4
And I had
00:08:11 Speaker 4
My classmates went on to Broadway.
00:08:14 Speaker 4
My Minnie Faye to my Barnaby Tucker went on to be Cosette in Les Mis.
00:08:20 Speaker 4
And another classmate went on to star in Sister Act 2, Sister Act, the Musical and Rock of Ages.
00:08:26 Speaker 4
So I look back on it and I think, could I have done that?
00:08:28 Speaker 4
Because I beat that guy out for every part.
00:08:32 Speaker 4
And I kind of dreamed of doing it.
00:08:34 Speaker 4
And Ronda Jean McMurtry was like, no, sir.
00:08:39 Speaker 4
You can't stand rejection.
00:08:41 Speaker 4
And that is a life of rejection, of going and getting turned down.
00:08:46 Speaker 4
So you need to move on.
00:08:47 Speaker 4
And I went to law school where I then got rejected from tons of law firms when I was applying.
00:08:54 Speaker 4
So it kind of squelched that dream a little, not squelched, I shouldn't say that.
00:08:58 Speaker 4
I'm thrilled with how my career has turned out.
00:09:02 Speaker 4
And, you know, it lets me exercise all of my many talents.
00:09:06 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:09:07 Speaker 3
Yes, indeed.
00:09:08 Speaker 3
So I haven't heard fathers mentioned.
00:09:10 Speaker 3
Did they come into play with any of the decisions about what you were going to do?
00:09:14 Speaker 2
So certainly not with what I played in terms of the instruments.
00:09:20 Speaker 2
That was all my mother.
00:09:21 Speaker 2
I mean, I will say when I took up the piano, I didn't want to play the piano, but
00:09:25 Speaker 2
When I took up the cello, I didn't even know what a cello was.
00:09:27 Speaker 2
I wanted to play the flute.
00:09:29 Speaker 2
My father thought the clarinet was a really good idea, and my mom said, no, she's going to play the cello.
00:09:34 Speaker 2
And so here we are, years later, still play the cello.
00:09:37 Speaker 2
Never touched a flute or a clarinet.
00:09:39 Speaker 2
But my dad was an architect by profession, and he was a fine artist by, you know, on the side.
00:09:48 Speaker 2
And when he retired, he even became an artist full-time and did shows and sold his work.
00:09:55 Speaker 2
So I had this sort of seeping in that world that was a combination of something that was artistic and professional at the same time.
00:10:07 Speaker 2
And architecture, so much of that is creative expression.
00:10:10 Speaker 2
So when I went to law school, I did have it in my mind that I wanted to do IP.
00:10:16 Speaker 2
I didn't really know what it entailed at all.
00:10:18 Speaker 2
But I thought, oh, this could be a way that I marry my interest in the arts with my interest in the law.
00:10:23 Speaker 3
Fantastic.
00:10:24 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:10:24 Speaker 3
Did you have a story about that?
00:10:26 Speaker 4
Yeah, so my dad worked at a factory.
00:10:28 Speaker 4
He worked at the DuPont factory in Old Hickory, Tennessee.
00:10:31 Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:10:32 Speaker 4
And had no relationship to music.
00:10:34 Speaker 4
Cannot, proudly, cannot carry a tune or.
00:10:37 Speaker 2
Yeah, my dad either.
00:10:40 Speaker 5
Neither can I.
00:10:41 Speaker 4
And you know, there's, I think of the, there's a musical, ***** Boots, and there's a really good song in that, in that musical that kind of touches me.
00:10:50 Speaker 4
It's, I'm not my father's son.
00:10:52 Speaker 4
I'm not the vision of what he dreamed of.
00:10:55 Speaker 4
And my dad loves sports.
00:10:57 Speaker 4
I have a younger brother that was an all-star athlete and his older sister who's an all-star athlete.
00:11:03 Speaker 4
My brother went to both went to college on athletic scholarships.
00:11:08 Speaker 4
And I was, you know, the Maryland Munster of my family who was pretty good at school and played piano and really into theater.
00:11:17 Speaker 4
And it was
00:11:18 Speaker 4
My dad suffered through it.
00:11:20 Speaker 4
He went to the recitals and he went to the performances, but with a smile, but I knew.
00:11:27 Speaker 4
He would much rather be at my brother's basketball game.
00:11:29 Speaker 4
Yeah, that was my dad.
00:11:30 Speaker 3
My dad was an architect and there was not a theatrical bone in his body, but he was a very good artist.
00:11:36 Speaker 3
I mean, he could do anything with a pen.
00:11:38 Speaker 3
But when I went into the theater, you know, all he said to me was, well, I don't know how you're going to make a living.
00:11:43 Speaker 3
And that was that.
00:11:44 Speaker 3
And I went, I'm going to.
00:11:46 Speaker 3
go to New York City, I'm gonna do shows, and I'm gonna make a living, and then I'm gonna start writing screenplays, and I'm gonna make more money than you ever did.
00:11:51 Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:11:52 Speaker 3
I've never said that to him.
00:11:53 Speaker 3
Yeah, feature films that have gone theatrical worldwide later, here you are.
00:11:58 Speaker 3
But it's a pathway, right?
00:11:59 Speaker 3
We all get on these paths, and it's hard to figure out where they're gonna go, but I mean, for you guys, it's been beautiful, right?
00:12:06 Speaker 4
But I mean, it kind of tells you about your personality, your risk tolerance, and that translates into your practice today.
00:12:12 Speaker 4
My risk tolerance was apparently pretty low, and Wanda Jeans was even lower.
00:12:19 Speaker 4
Like, I'm not going to gamble on that.
00:12:21 Speaker 3
And how did NBC Universal come along for you, Milan?
00:12:27 Speaker 2
Oh my gosh.
00:12:28 Speaker 2
So I, you know, I've kind of been a studio kid for the vast majority of my career.
00:12:34 Speaker 2
I started at a firm for a couple years, went to Disney.
00:12:37 Speaker 2
Mostly because my husband got appointed to the UCLA Law School faculty, and I had to find myself a new gig.
00:12:45 Speaker 2
Loved that.
00:12:45 Speaker 2
Went on to head the team at Fox, 20th Century Fox, for about a decade.
00:12:50 Speaker 2
And Kim Harris, my general counsel, who is amazing, was two years behind me in law school, but I didn't know her in law school.
00:12:59 Speaker 2
And when she got the GC role at NBCU,
00:13:02 Speaker 2
People kept saying to me, oh, you should try and be friends with Kim Harris because you guys would love each other.
00:13:07 Speaker 2
And I thought, yeah, I don't think that's how it works.
00:13:10 Speaker 2
Hey, people say I should be friends with you.
00:13:11 Speaker 2
You want to be friends?
00:13:13 Speaker 2
But there comes a day where her office reaches out to me and says, Kim Harris is going to be in LA, and she was hoping that you could have coffee with her.
00:13:21 Speaker 2
And I'm thinking, oh, well, maybe Kim Harris wants to be friends with me.
00:13:25 Speaker 2
And so I said, oh, sure, I'll have coffee with Kim Harris.
00:13:29 Speaker 2
I meet her at this hotel.
00:13:31 Speaker 2
In the lobby, we were having coffee.
00:13:33 Speaker 2
And about 10 minutes, 15 minutes in, I realized, oh my God, I think she's trying to talk to me about a job.
00:13:40 Speaker 2
And that's how it all started.
00:13:41 Speaker 2
And so then she was just phenomenal.
00:13:47 Speaker 2
Her senior team was so incredible.
00:13:49 Speaker 2
And I was sort of feeling like I was ready for a change.
00:13:53 Speaker 2
So I moved over there almost nine years ago.
00:13:57 Speaker 2
And it was right before, it was like the year before Disney and Fox merged.
00:14:01 Speaker 2
So it was perfect timing in reality.
00:14:03 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:14:04 Speaker 3
And you know, you can't have TV and movies without music.
00:14:07 Speaker 3
That's true.
00:14:08 Speaker 3
So does that take up your teams, a lot of their bandwidth?
00:14:11 Speaker 3
Is it a lot of copyright stuff?
00:14:14 Speaker 2
Yeah, so we do a ton of copyright work.
00:14:16 Speaker 2
We do not do all the music work.
00:14:17 Speaker 2
We have a dedicated music team.
00:14:20 Speaker 2
And you'll hear from Rick in a second that he led that kind of team along with his IP function when he was at Turner.
00:14:27 Speaker 2
But I did have in my group for a while until they consolidated all the music work, all the PR licensing, which I will say when we did decide to integrate all the music with one single team, I was really happy to give that over.
00:14:44 Speaker 2
It's a very difficult, intricate, arcane practice.
00:14:48 Speaker 2
that I was really having to learn in order to supervise.
00:14:52 Speaker 2
But we do have a lot of issues that come up on music and copyright, like copyright termination issues, things like that, my team will advise on.
00:15:02 Speaker 2
But in terms of doing the actual deals, working with Cynthia Revo and Ariana Grande's managers and everything like that, we're not the ones on there.
00:15:11 Speaker 2
We're support services to them.
00:15:13 Speaker 4
But I bet you get a lot of fair use questions.
00:15:15 Speaker 4
Can I use this lyric?
00:15:18 Speaker 2
Questions that come to us first about, we want, we did this, we aired it, now we want to put it into digital, now we want to take it global, we cleared it for the US market, what do we need to do?
00:15:29 Speaker 2
That kind of stuff will help with, for sure.
00:15:31 Speaker 4
Yeah, all the time.
00:15:31 Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:15:32 Speaker 2
And Rick, Warner music.
00:15:35 Speaker 4
Yeah, parody.
00:15:36 Speaker 2
I mean, we have SNL.
00:15:38 Speaker 2
So then they want to parody different songs and we're like, okay.
00:15:46 Speaker 3
I mean, Warner Music, I have great memories of, half of my albums growing up had Warner.
00:15:52 Speaker 3
I mean, talk about iconic company.
00:15:54 Speaker 3
I mean, the Stones and Led Zeppelin and the Bee Gees in the 70s.
00:15:58 Speaker 3
I mean, did you walk into that thinking, I mean, I know it wasn't Warner Music in the beginning, but how did it build the music part of your career?
00:16:07 Speaker 3
Was it a natural thing or did you try to, did you gravitate to that?
00:16:10 Speaker 4
I didn't.
00:16:10 Speaker 4
No, my whole career has been happenstance, like great.
00:16:14 Speaker 4
happenstance.
00:16:15 Speaker 4
So I didn't start out as a trademark attorney.
00:16:18 Speaker 4
I started out as a litigator.
00:16:19 Speaker 4
They put me in the IP litigation group.
00:16:22 Speaker 4
My first case was about heat shrinkable plastic film and the thermal viscosity at which film melts around an object.
00:16:28 Speaker 4
And to this day, I don't understand anything about it.
00:16:30 Speaker 4
And I wanted to stab my eyes out and begged them to give me something else to do.
00:16:36 Speaker 4
And they gave me a domain name dispute.
00:16:39 Speaker 4
about a **** site that I was like, this is far more interesting than heat shrinkable plastic film.
00:16:45 Speaker 4
So thus began my career in trademarks.
00:16:48 Speaker 4
And I was dating my now husband when I was at that firm in DC and he was in Alabama and he didn't want to move to DC and I didn't want to move to Alabama.
00:16:58 Speaker 4
So we moved to Atlanta as our compromise city.
00:17:00 Speaker 4
And that's how I ended up in Atlanta.
00:17:03 Speaker 4
And I was staffed on another IP litigation matter.
00:17:06 Speaker 4
This one about refrigerator door handles.
00:17:09 Speaker 4
when my friend called me and said, CNN needs a trademark attorney, would you be interested?
00:17:15 Speaker 4
And I said, yes.
00:17:17 Speaker 4
because I don't like doing this case about refrigerator door handles.
00:17:21 Speaker 4
So that's how I ended up at Turner.
00:17:24 Speaker 4
And for 14 years, I was there and worked my way up to be the chief IP counsel.
00:17:30 Speaker 4
And we had a restructure.
00:17:32 Speaker 4
And they asked me if I would be interested in leading the music group.
00:17:37 Speaker 4
And I was like, yeah, music is IP.
00:17:38 Speaker 4
That's a natural fit with what I do.
00:17:43 Speaker 4
And it took me
00:17:44 Speaker 4
a year and a half to learn the esoteric world of music law.
00:17:48 Speaker 4
And Milan is exactly right.
00:17:50 Speaker 4
You know, it is a beast unto its own, but led that team for over a decade.
00:17:56 Speaker 4
And I got to do the business affairs side of it too, you know, which was really fun and interesting and managing, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets to license our music and also license it out and make money off of it.
00:18:11 Speaker 4
And how do we make money off of it in the best way?
00:18:13 Speaker 4
And
00:18:13 Speaker 4
It kind of gave me a chance to kind of do not only the traditional legal work, but much more of the business work.
00:18:21 Speaker 4
And that's what I've enjoyed the most about my career is just adding things to it and learning new things.
00:18:28 Speaker 4
And some things, turns out, probably don't want to do that again.
00:18:34 Speaker 4
But music was one that stuck with me and I love doing it.
00:18:36 Speaker 2
And by the way, he's being incredibly modest about that.
00:18:40 Speaker 2
I mean, it sounds like a big job and it was a big job and it is a big job.
00:18:43 Speaker 2
But he also revolutionized their music business.
00:18:47 Speaker 2
He completely streamlined it.
00:18:49 Speaker 2
He saved them huge amounts of money and increased actual net revenue for the business by millions of dollars.
00:18:58 Speaker 2
So that's not an easy feat.
00:19:00 Speaker 4
You see why we're friends?
00:19:03 Speaker 2
Like Rick's like, oh yeah, I spend a year and a half learning in.
00:19:06 Speaker 2
This is by happenstance, my career.
00:19:09 Speaker 2
Rick's career
00:19:10 Speaker 2
There are certain things in every career that are happenstance, and then there are certain things because you show up and you make miracles like Rick does, and then that's how you get all these other opportunities.
00:19:21 Speaker 4
I'm glad it's the podcast because I'm blushing right now.
00:19:25 Speaker 3
Well, I was thinking about, you know, over the years with music and in the last 25 years, there's been
00:19:32 Speaker 3
sampling, there was Napster, and then everything went digital, and now we're heading into the AI world with music, and music's coming after, AI's coming after music pretty well.
00:19:42 Speaker 3
I mean, what do you guys see trend-wise?
00:19:45 Speaker 3
I mean, you've lived through a lot of that stuff in your jobs, and so where's it all going now?
00:19:50 Speaker 2
I mean, I think the AI stuff is a completely different thread than we've seen.
00:19:56 Speaker 2
And I would say all of media and entertainment has really had to
00:20:02 Speaker 2
focus tremendous amounts of intellectual energy and trying to understand the ramifications, understand the technology, understand how it works, how it trains, the capabilities, the speed at which there will be innovation that could impact us both in ways that benefit us and in ways that harm us.
00:20:24 Speaker 2
But music, huge swell of
00:20:29 Speaker 2
activity around it.
00:20:30 Speaker 2
And you see it a lot right now in the legislative arena.
00:20:34 Speaker 2
So, and Rick and I have been working on committees that have to do with that, marrying kind of this digital replica world with what existed in the right of publicity legal framework and trying to figure out how do you balance between the two, because there's protections that musicians and musical artists need
00:20:56 Speaker 2
that could really impact and hinder what film and television companies need.
00:21:04 Speaker 2
Because if it's too restrictive, then all of a sudden it really kind of impinges upon the First Amendment kind of creative expressive works exemptions that we've traditionally benefited from and which allow us to do the type of content we do.
00:21:19 Speaker 2
including stuff that can be fact-based.
00:21:21 Speaker 2
So that, I think, has been one of the really crazy challenges of the last couple of years.
00:21:25 Speaker 4
Yeah, I think you're right.
00:21:26 Speaker 4
I mean, the RIAA, which represents the music side of the creative industry, you know, I think they did have our like real knee-jerk aversion to it because they were one of the first ones impacted with the fake Drakes and all of that.
00:21:45 Speaker 4
And then, of course, SAG-AFTRA with the actors.
00:21:48 Speaker 4
And I think we found ourselves in the middle, right?
00:21:50 Speaker 4
Because we saw these benefits of AI and, how it could enhance the storytelling capability for film and television.
00:22:00 Speaker 4
But we also understand that we are, you know, we're protecting our intellectual property assets and the talent and their core assets.
00:22:11 Speaker 4
And so trying to find that happy middle has been the real trick.
00:22:15 Speaker 4
And, you know,
00:22:17 Speaker 4
I think with AI and music, there is an impact on that industry.
00:22:22 Speaker 4
But there was an impact when streaming came along and you didn't have to buy CDs anymore.
00:22:28 Speaker 4
And then you see the shift to like, okay, well, maybe live performance is where we're going to make our money because we've lost all our money on CDs.
00:22:38 Speaker 4
And you sort of have to adapt and figure it out.
00:22:42 Speaker 4
And quickly.
00:22:43 Speaker 4
And quickly, yeah.
00:22:44 Speaker 4
But at the same time,
00:22:46 Speaker 4
and at the risk of getting fired from, at least I'm not the register of copyright, so I can say this, you can't just use somebody else's work without permission or some sort of license or some sort of fair use exception, reasonable fair use exception to create other work based on that work.
00:23:08 Speaker 2
Especially work that would compete with it.
00:23:09 Speaker 4
Yeah, that competes directly with it.
00:23:12 Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that's right.
00:23:14 Speaker 4
And you're going to squelch creativity if you do that.
00:23:15 Speaker 2
Exactly.
00:23:16 Speaker 2
And I would go, that's the other place that I would go to, especially with music.
00:23:20 Speaker 2
And I understand why the recording artists and the composers are so threatened by this new technology.
00:23:28 Speaker 2
And, you know, this may show my age.
00:23:32 Speaker 2
I just don't believe that there's any replacement for human creativity.
00:23:36 Speaker 2
And music is an expression of the human soul.
00:23:40 Speaker 2
A machine can
00:23:42 Speaker 2
scoop up everything there is, but it don't really replicate what it's scooped up.
00:23:48 Speaker 2
And the beauty of music is it's always a new expression of the human soul.
00:23:54 Speaker 2
That's not something a machine can do.
00:23:56 Speaker 3
It's going to be, I think, really interesting in the future, because you just hear a piece of music and you hear a voice singing.
00:24:03 Speaker 3
I don't think you can tell whether it's a human or a machine these days.
00:24:06 Speaker 3
I mean, that's what they're going to.
00:24:07 Speaker 3
And so, wow, that's a cool, who is that?
00:24:09 Speaker 3
And then you find out it's, oh, that's nobody.
00:24:11 Speaker 3
It's an AI.
00:24:12 Speaker 3
Then how do you feel about the music at that point?
00:24:14 Speaker 3
You go, well, I still thought it was a pretty good song.
00:24:18 Speaker 3
Or does music require you to have a story behind it?
00:24:22 Speaker 3
Who's the artist?
00:24:23 Speaker 3
What's their story?
00:24:24 Speaker 3
I love the music because I love the musician.
00:24:27 Speaker 3
I think like that all the time.
00:24:28 Speaker 2
Well, I think we also saw
00:24:31 Speaker 2
we moved into the era from vinyl to cassette tape to CD.
00:24:36 Speaker 2
I'm really aging myself now.
00:24:37 Speaker 2
Yeah, you forgot 8 track.
00:24:38 Speaker 2
8 track.
00:24:39 Speaker 2
You're streaming music, right?
00:24:41 Speaker 2
And then you saw all this migration back to vinyl, especially for certain genres of music.
00:24:46 Speaker 4
That's right.
00:24:47 Speaker 2
Because you could hear the breaths, you could hear the pedal change, you could hear all this.
00:24:50 Speaker 3
You could hear the record go.
00:24:51 Speaker 2
You could hear the stuff that...
00:24:55 Speaker 2
like gave it emotional resonance and context in a different way.
00:24:59 Speaker 2
I think it's part of the reason why live took over too.
00:25:02 Speaker 2
Besides the business models really being challenged in the way you're delivering music and whether you could really earn enough to continue to create that.
00:25:12 Speaker 2
I still think that will remain, that there will, you know, it's a pendulum.
00:25:18 Speaker 2
It's A pendulum.
00:25:19 Speaker 4
You're right.
00:25:21 Speaker 4
That's a good analogy to vinyl records and the comeback of that and what drove that.
00:25:27 Speaker 4
And I think you're right.
00:25:28 Speaker 4
Like just there's a certain nostalgia to it, maybe for people of our age, but that's, you know, I have a nephew who's much younger than me and prefers vinyl, and he doesn't have that nostalgia because he didn't have it in the 1st place.
00:25:39 Speaker 4
So there's got to be something other than that.
00:25:41 Speaker 4
And it's that, you know, the breath that you hear.
00:25:44 Speaker 3
I've got a 14-year-old who, because I play
00:25:47 Speaker 3
Motown all the time.
00:25:48 Speaker 3
That's how I did my music.
00:25:50 Speaker 3
Earth, Wind, and Fire, Motown, all those great bands that came around in the 60s and 70s.
00:25:53 Speaker 3
And my 14-year-old now knows all of them.
00:25:56 Speaker 3
And he'll walk along singing like Earth, Wind, and Fire.
00:25:58 Speaker 3
I'm like, this is so great.
00:26:00 Speaker 3
Of course, he's all got his stuff too, you know, the other.
00:26:03 Speaker 2
Yeah, they do.
00:26:05 Speaker 2
But our kids are the same way.
00:26:06 Speaker 2
And I was so lucky that I took Olivia to the Kennedy Center Honors, the year that Earth, Wind, and Fire were being honored.
00:26:14 Speaker 2
And she got to meet her.
00:26:16 Speaker 2
I mean, it was like, and she told them, she just stood there and she said, I have to tell you how much your music has meant to our whole family.
00:26:24 Speaker 2
Oh my God, that's amazing.
00:26:25 Speaker 2
And she was like 20 something.
00:26:27 Speaker 2
And I think they were like, wow, that's great.
00:26:29 Speaker 4
That's amazing.
00:26:30 Speaker 3
I'll have to find that on YouTube that, because I haven't seen that one.
00:26:33 Speaker 3
I've watched a lot of the Kennedy Center's honors programs, but I haven't seen that one.
00:26:37 Speaker 3
I'll check it out.
00:26:37 Speaker 2
It was great.
00:26:38 Speaker 4
I heard my son singing Les Mis up in his bedroom one day, and I just was like, oh.
00:26:42 Speaker 2
I know.
00:26:43 Speaker 4
He does listen to me.
00:26:47 Speaker 2
During COVID, I had 70s music playing in the house all the time.
00:26:51 Speaker 2
It was like a coping mechanism.
00:26:54 Speaker 2
We would make dinner together.
00:26:55 Speaker 2
We'd do our jigsaw puzzles, have dinner together, listening to 70s music.
00:26:59 Speaker 2
It was great.
00:27:00 Speaker 4
That's awesome.
00:27:01 Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:27:02 Speaker 3
Well, the question that I asked in the beginning about lawyers as artists, you know, it'd be great to talk about that a little bit because, and since I've been here, I've asked 10 to 12 different attorneys if they ever thought of themselves artists.
00:27:14 Speaker 3
And
00:27:15 Speaker 3
Most of them immediately went, no, not right.
00:27:18 Speaker 3
But there was three or four of them who went, yeah, I have moments when I feel like I'm working on a more intuitive level and I'm being more creative on a particularly tough issue.
00:27:29 Speaker 3
That resonated.
00:27:30 Speaker 3
And then I had one, I had one litigator who said, every time I walk on a court, into a court, I'm performing for that jury.
00:27:39 Speaker 3
So, you know, interesting.
00:27:41 Speaker 3
I just wonder if you guys have ever felt
00:27:43 Speaker 3
Like you're an artist.
00:27:44 Speaker 3
Have you felt artistic in what you do?
00:27:47 Speaker 4
I do.
00:27:48 Speaker 4
Not every day.
00:27:49 Speaker 4
Not every trademark clearance search or license agreement that you're marking up do you necessarily feel like you're being very artistic at the moment.
00:27:59 Speaker 4
And I'm stealing from Elon because we were chatting about it just before this, but I feel like a storyteller.
00:28:05 Speaker 4
And when I get a chance to be a storyteller, because that's what I kind of feel like I am at heart.
00:28:09 Speaker 4
I love telling a good story, getting a laugh.
00:28:13 Speaker 4
or, phrasing something in a very clever way that makes people rethink.
00:28:19 Speaker 4
So if you've got an office action response, perhaps, and, sometimes it's not crystal clear and you really tell that story of like, here's why, you know, here's why I see this differently than you examiner might see this and doing, going out and finding that, doing a little research to help tell your story.
00:28:43 Speaker 4
is really, one of the most fun parts of my job to me.
00:28:48 Speaker 4
And then I also think about strategy and putting everything together.
00:28:52 Speaker 4
And sometimes I feel like a conductor in an orchestra of, like, okay, I need a little more strings here.
00:28:59 Speaker 4
I need a little more, you know, okay, let's quiet it down, you know, and there's a lot to that.
00:29:04 Speaker 4
Like, often I give advice that is not legal advice, it's practical advice.
00:29:09 Speaker 4
Like,
00:29:10 Speaker 4
yes, you can do it, but you probably don't want to.
00:29:13 Speaker 4
Or if you want to do it, let's do it in a quieter way.
00:29:17 Speaker 4
And not because of the legal risks so much as there might be negative PR or there might be, you might just draw a claim, even though we don't think that claim is strong.
00:29:27 Speaker 4
So oftentimes I kind of analogize my work to artistry.
00:29:32 Speaker 4
And I tell, you know,
00:29:34 Speaker 4
young lawyers all the time, a lot of this is more of an art than a science.
00:29:37 Speaker 4
Like if it were a science, then AI would have my job too, right?
00:29:41 Speaker 4
Because they could go in, look at this.
00:29:44 Speaker 4
Nope, Mark isn't clear for clearance search because of my algorithm.
00:29:50 Speaker 4
But that's not always how you make that decision.
00:29:54 Speaker 2
Yeah, that's right.
00:29:56 Speaker 2
I think risky, I mean, because that's what we do, right?
00:29:59 Speaker 2
We're like,
00:30:01 Speaker 2
It's really about risk assessment and risk management.
00:30:04 Speaker 2
I used to say mitigation, but it's not even always mitigation, right?
00:30:07 Speaker 2
Like sometimes you're going to take a little higher risk, you're just managing it.
00:30:11 Speaker 2
And the legal analysis is part of that, and there can be artistry in legal analysis itself, but the rest of that is what you're getting at, Rick.
00:30:19 Speaker 2
And it just triggered something for me that I thought, you know, the reason AI can't do what we do, or we don't think AI would be able to do what we do, right, is your second brain is your gut.
00:30:31 Speaker 2
Right?
00:30:32 Speaker 2
And we always talk about gut instinct.
00:30:34 Speaker 2
A lot of what we do, it's not because there's like a technical fact that we know that leads us to make that conclusion or that risk call.
00:30:42 Speaker 2
It's our gut.
00:30:43 Speaker 2
And you hone a gut over years and years and years.
00:30:46 Speaker 2
The thing that I love about music and artistry is that, yeah, your traditional brain's involved, but other intelligence owners are involved.
00:30:57 Speaker 2
Your heart, your gut,
00:31:00 Speaker 2
That's what makes it art.
00:31:02 Speaker 2
And that's what makes it as complex and as nuanced and as, you know, that's what makes it art.
00:31:10 Speaker 2
And I think that you do have to bring into play all the time in these advisory legal roles, and especially when you're working with people who are creative.
00:31:21 Speaker 2
So Rick and I have spent the vast majority of our careers
00:31:25 Speaker 2
In creative industries, and if you do not have an artistic sensibility that you can tap into, so that you can make it clear to the people that you're advising that you understand their creative process, you understand the artistry of the impetus behind what they're trying to accomplish.
00:31:45 Speaker 2
It makes it so much tougher to be able to advise them in a way where they see you as part of the creative process and not just a necessary evil that they have to consult.
00:31:56 Speaker 3
Because you have to understand first.
00:31:57 Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:31:58 Speaker 3
Right.
00:31:58 Speaker 2
Exactly.
00:31:58 Speaker 3
You've got to really listen and get it before you can-- before instincts kick in, before the strategy kick in.
00:32:04 Speaker 3
Right.
00:32:05 Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:32:06 Speaker 2
Because we're here-- our sole mission for positions like Rick and mine
00:32:11 Speaker 2
Is to facilitate the creative vision that somebody else developed, right?
00:32:17 Speaker 2
That's that's my whole purpose.
00:32:19 Speaker 2
I'm not here to stand in anybody's way.
00:32:21 Speaker 2
I'm here to facilitate their vision and just make sure we do it with, you know, less legal risk.
00:32:28 Speaker 4
Yeah, eyes wide open.
00:32:30 Speaker 4
And that's what I like to say.
00:32:31 Speaker 4
Like, you know, we're just going in this eyes wide open and I don't want to squelch your dream, you know, and.
00:32:39 Speaker 4
I try to counsel like younger lawyers and things about communication style when you're dealing particularly with creative people who their heart and soul is in this thing.
00:32:50 Speaker 4
And if it looks like you're coming in and you're telling them, I'm here to put a big no stamp on your dream, that is not the way to communicate that.
00:32:59 Speaker 4
And going in and just sort of
00:33:01 Speaker 4
being able to empathize and understand and appreciate.
00:33:05 Speaker 4
And I think having an artistic background to some degree helps you empathize with those clients a little bit more and helps you be creative at helping them achieve that dream.
00:33:15 Speaker 4
So long as they're not like, I just want to, you know, name my new show Saturday Night Live and the answer is just no.
00:33:23 Speaker 2
Of course, no suggestion I've given them as an alternative name.
00:33:26 Speaker 2
It's not turned out to be adopted, but one time's a different question.
00:33:29 Speaker 4
In 25 years, one time, and I said, like, wait, maybe you could try that as an option.
00:33:35 Speaker 4
Automatic no.
00:33:37 Speaker 4
One time I got it in.
00:33:38 Speaker 2
Oh, you got it in.
00:33:38 Speaker 4
One out of thousands of suggestions over the years.
00:33:42 Speaker 2
I think when I give mine, they just automatically know.
00:33:45 Speaker 2
That's so sweet of you to try and help.
00:33:51 Speaker 3
This has been great.
00:33:53 Speaker 3
Thank you guys so much for your thoughts.
00:33:55 Speaker 3
So people listening to this, you are creative and attorneys are creative.
00:33:59 Speaker 3
I talk to so many, they go, no, I'm not creative at all.
00:34:01 Speaker 3
Yeah, you are.
00:34:01 Speaker 3
You just have to find it, you know, and it'll help you.
00:34:04 Speaker 3
And so great for you guys to come in and give your thoughts about this.
00:34:08 Speaker 3
Very valuable.
00:34:09 Speaker 3
Great stuff.
00:34:10 Speaker 4
Thank you for having us.
00:34:12 Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:34:12 Speaker 2
Made it so fun.
00:34:13 Speaker 4
Yeah, I get to sit here with you 2 and have a chat.
00:34:15 Speaker 4
I'll do that anytime.
00:34:16 Speaker 2
Me too.
00:34:17 Speaker 3
Let's go get a cocktail.
00:34:18 Speaker 3
Okay, thank you very much.
00:34:20 Speaker 3
Appreciate it and check us out.
00:34:22 Speaker 3
I'm brand new.