Lee S. Brenner

Brenner is the chair of Venable’s entertainment and media litigation group, where he was named the Century City Bar Association’s 2020 Entertainment Lawyer of the Year.

He has more than 20 years’ experience handling high-stakes copyright, idea submission, defamation and First Amendment cases.

Clients have included ViacomCBS Inc., CBS Studios Inc., Fox Entertainment Group, Disney Enterprises Inc., Showtime, HBO, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., New Line Productions Inc. and others.

Thanks to the pandemic, he said, “I get a lot of calls arising from the increased demand for content in the entertainment world. The demand is so great that there has been an uptick in idea submission claims.”

Those arise when people who have pitched a suggestion and later seen a show on the screen contend that the work is based on their idea.

“It’s akin to copyright infringement,” Brenner said of the situation. “The claim is, ‘You must have used my work.’ In non-Covid times, safeguards were in place to avoid all this. Now, with no in-person meetings, the formalities can get overlooked.”

“In Zoom calls or phone calls, there’s often no written submission agreement” to limit the liability of the person taking the call, he said. “That worries me.”

In the past, “There’d be the start of a pitch and the producer would say, ‘No, we have something like this in the works, I will end this pitch right now.’ I want to see that happening,” Brenner said.

“I’ve seen situations where there are 14 people — by actual count — pitching the same general plot idea. In such cases, following the formal pitch meeting rules is important,” he said.

“But you put Covid together with the increased volume of platforms and consequent increased demand for content, there’s been slippage on the formalities of taking pitches,” Brenner added. “And that has led to an increase in allegations in demand letters.”

Brenner avoids identifying specific clients linked to current cases. He said he represented an independent film producer in a dispute relating to the production of the sequel to an Academy Award-winning documentary.

The producer, through the production company’s owners, hired a director to direct and edit the first phase of the sequel’s production.

After the owner terminated the director from the project, the director asserted that he was a co-author of the sequel and therefore a co-owner of the copyright. The parties settled the matter without formal litigation.

— John Roemer