Jeffrey D. Goldman

Goldman, a partner and the entertainment litigation chair at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, keeps on his living room wall the honorary gold record awarded by the Recording Industry Association of America for his role on the Napster copyright infringement case.

After a year of the pandemic, he’s accustomed to working from home.

“Some old school folks think face time is important,” he said of the push to reopen offices and resume the rounds of meetings that once were routine. “But I think remote work is the wave of the future.”

“Office space is expensive,” Goldman said. “The new generation of law firm management will be reconsidering their leases. Also, my dogs are used to my being here all the time.”

Goldman’s clients include Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Publishing Group Inc., Target Corp., Alan Parsons, and others.

In 2020, he obtained summary judgment for Sony and Universal Music in a copyright infringement case alleging that the hip-hop group Cypress Hill’s song “Spark Another Owl” infringed a plaintiff’s musical composition, “The Beautiful and Omnipresent Love.” Straughter v. Concord Music, 19-CV01360 (C.D. Cal., filed July 24, 2019).

At first, coronavirus-inspired delays impeded the litigation. “The copyright office was closed, so we could not get the deposit copy of the plaintiff’s song, and the 9th Circuit has held that the deposit copy circumscribes the scope of the copyright,” Goldman said.

“The plaintiffs said they’d lost their copy,” he added. “But just before the summary judgment deadline, a third party provided us with a copy.”

Goldman learned that the deposit copy did not contain the material allegedly infringed by Cypress Hill. “Just two months before trial, it turned out we were entitled to summary judgment.”

For Alan Parsons, the Grammy-winning recording artist and producer of the Alan Parsons Project, Goldman obtained a worldwide preliminary injunction in trademark litigation against Parsons’ former concert booker and tour manager who was promoting a knock-off band with a confusingly similar name made up of former session musicians who had performed on some of Parsons’ albums.

The name was “The Original Alan Parsons Band The Project—The Men Who Made The Records.”

The injunction was recently affirmed by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Alan Parsons v. Regna, 20-11293 (11th Cir., op. filed March 17, 2021).

“The day I went to Orlando [for the district court hearing] was the day that sports shut down and Tom Hanks announced he had Covid,” Goldman recalled.

“I got the injunction just as concerts were shutting down. It seemed futile, but now concerts are coming back and the value of the injunction is finally manifesting itself. Mr. Parsons is happy he can return to touring without an impostor band getting in his way.”

— John Roemer