Aaron J. Moss

Moss considers himself to be a copyright geek. As proof, there’s the blog he writes called Copyright Lately, where he examines copyright issues, developments and cases in depth — usually about 2,000 words — once or twice a week. He has recently written about Dua Lipa, a college professor suing cheating students for copyright infringement and NFTs.

“Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to avoid getting caught up in the NFT saga,” he said, noting that several clients have consulted with him about the blockchain art objects.

“There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what you actually get when you buy an NFT, and generally it does not include any sort of copyright interest, which some folks are surprised to find out,” Moss said. Rather, they paid well for the equivalent of a painting on their phone.

The new phenomenon also has him enforcing Riot Games LLC’s intellectual property rights in its television series “Arcane” against infringers who registered internet domain names featuring his client’s IP and then offered NFTs and cryptocurrency for sale based on the animated series. He has filed complaints with a domain registry and other entities to get the sites taken down.

“Whenever there’s any sort of new shiny object, you have people looking to bilk people out of their money,” Moss said.

On the litigation side of his practice, he won a 9th Circuit victory March 4 for Costco. It upheld a summary judgment, tossing a putative class action accusing the retailer of false advertising for selling Apple AirPods that can’t charge wirelessly. Moss said the case raised an interesting issue about whether consumers would believe Costco was advertising AirPods wireless charging cases when no such case was explicitly mentioned in the ads. Thomas v. Costco Wholesale Corp., 2:20-cv-00718 (S.D. Cal., filed April 15, 2020).

In September, he quickly ended an action against Jerry Seinfeld, NBCUniversal and others claiming they had infringed the plaintiff’s copyright in an unproduced script about bees by making the animated film “Bee Movie” back in 2007. Evans v. NBCUniversal Media LLC, 2:21- cv-0984 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 30, 2021).

He demonstrated to the judge that the plaintiff could not establish substantial similarity between the two “Bee Movies” nor that the defendants ever saw the plaintiff’s script. But Moss said such quick action on thin copyright claims is growing less common because the 9th Circuit has begun ruling that some of the cases should continue into the discovery phase.

Only about half of Moss’s practice is litigation, he said. The other half is counseling and advising clients about intellectual property.

“There are a number of companies and estates that I do that kind of work for,” he said, but he can’t identify any. “They would be high profile if people knew about them, but that’s the whole point.”

– Don DeBenedictis