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Type “entertainment” into the Google search engine, and "about 162,000,000" results appear, led by E! Online. Type “entertainment law” into the Google search engine, and about 40,000,000 results are listed, with Beverly Hills entertainment attorney Mark Litwak's site listed first, and the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal (COMM/ENT) not far behind. From the lowbrow to the highbrow, these searches offer an excellent summary of the range of online sources that entertainment attorneys use to stay informed. More specific questions can be addressed by refining one’s search techniques.

 

To begin researching an entertainment law question, a good approach is to locate and peruse law review articles, because they provide an overview of the area of law and cite to leading cases and laws. The Hastings COMM/ENT site lists articles ranging from communications, entertainment, and intellectual property to Internet, telecommunications, biotechnology, multimedia, broadcasting, and constitutional law. While the journal does not offer its articles online with full text, its does offer a free searchable index of articles from 1978 to 1994. For articles from 1995-2000, you can browse the volume's table of contents (the most current issues are not indexed online). Citations and abstracts of each article are provided.

 

If an attorney is seeking background information about entertainment in general, especially its people, the best places to start may be consumer entertainment sites. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish E! Online’s news from its gossip, but this site offers full-text searching of its extensive Hollywood coverage. It also boasts a useful hyperlink feature. Users reading an article can click on a celebrity’s name to retrieve a biography or a career chronology, a credit list, links to related E! Online stories, and links to multimedia clips and fan clubs.

 

"The Trades"
Reading entertainment trade publications in print is a morning ritual for most entertainment attorneys. The online versions, however, are useful for their archives of past stories and their currency. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety update their sites continually, and they may also post stories that are longer than those found in the print versions. The Hollywood Reporter’s subscriber site includes current news, archives (going back to early 1991), the Blu-Book Production Directory, a news scroll, box office charts, production listings, and script sales. Selected current news articles, from the site's homepage are available free, while access to most other stories require a paid subscription. Combination print/Web site subscriptions begin at $24.95/month with Web-only access priced at $19.95 monthly.

 

Variety.com has resources similar to those of the Hollywood Reporter, but its archive goes back much further—to 1914. Variety.com subscribers can register for various free e-newsletters, with topics ranging from film news to box office numbers. All users can search Variety's help wanted ads for free, as well as job change announcments, obituaries, and photos. Nonsubscribers can also read the headlines and abstracts of articles for free, as well as Variety columnists such as Army Archerd, Brian Lowry, Steven Gaydos and Peter Bart. Access to Variety’s site is free to print subscribers. The cost of an online-only subscription is $259 per year, or $24.95 per month. A free 14-day trial subscription is also available.

Attorneys with clients in the television or radio industry may also subscribe to Television Week (formerly Electronic Media) and/or Broadcasting & Cable. Both cover broadcast and cable television, but Broadcasting & Cable also covers the radio industry, while Television Week also covers the interactive media industry. Like the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, both host sites (www.tvweek.com and www.broadcastingcable.com, respectively). Every Monday, top stories from Television Week’s weekly print edition are added to TVWeek.com. The site is also updated every day with breaking news. TVweek.com's "more" link offers free full-text access to TVWeek.com, including all stories, pages and archives, BUT only if you register (and the registration does expire after some undisclosed amount of time at which time you would have to pay to subscribe). Subscribers to the print version can search the Web archives back to 1999. Subscriptions to the print edition run $119 per year.

 

Broadcasting & Cable’s site offers nonsubscribers abstracts of the print publication’s news and feature stories, as well as full-text access to columns by John Higgins and J. Max Robins. Full online access is free only to subscribers of either the print edition (at $189 per year) or the online version (at $15.95 per month). A free trial is available. The site also offers a free daily e-mail newsletter of top headlines.

 

Other Specialty Sources
Law librarians at entertainment law firms are often asked to obtain contact and background information about companies or people in the entertainment industry. The firms may be conducting background research on a potential client or an opposing party, or they may simply need an address to serve a complaint. For contact information and biographical data, entertainment law librarians favor two subscription sites: Baseline.Hollywood.com and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB, www.imdb.com), which offers a professional subscription that gives subscribers access to 55,000 contact and agent listings and box office statistics for 18 countries (including weekly and daily tallies for the United States). IMDbPro subscriptions are $12.95 per month, with a 14-day free trial available.Nonsubscribers can access some information for free, assuming they are able to wade through the continual pop-up advertising. Free information at IMDb includes searchable archives back to 1997, celebrity news, box office information, reviews, a picture gallery, and a film glossary. Nonsubscribers can view more detailed information (but not as much as subscribers) if they register, which costs nothing.

 

Baseline’s databases contain 1.5 million records, including 7,000 biographies; credits of 900,000 actors, producers, directors, and crews; and contact information for companies, executives, and talent. Baseline also includes archives of Kagan movie data, the Hollywood Reporter, and Variety. Updates about films and television programs in development and production, as well as current entertainment news, can be viewed in a daily e-mail message. Other information and statistics, including the Star Salary Report, are also available. Baselline subscribers are charged a one-time signup fee and are then charged on a per-document basis for the information they access. Companies pay Baseline a $99 sign-up fee (which also gets them a credit for $149 worth of per-document fees that must be used within 30 days). Individuals, schools and nonprofits, pay a $49 sign-up fee (which also gets them a credit for $49 worth of per-document fees that must be used within 30 days). Per-document fee that can range from $1.25 for current Weekly Variety stories to $79 for the Star Salary Report.

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What Two Attorneys Use
When I asked Susan Kaiser (http://www.skmedialaw.com/), an attorney who has represented network-owned radio and television stations and negotiates and drafts agreements and contracts, which resources she uses in her entertainment law practice, she responded: “Probably the resource I use most is Google—to search opposing counsel, talent names, potential clients, and law firms.” Searching Google makes sense when an attor-ney is trolling for any and all information, because Google, which indexes more of the Web than any other engine, casts a wide net. It is not surprising that her first line of research is a general search engine instead of an entertainment-related site.

 

Similarly, the vice president of legal and business affairs and general counsel at a major cable television network informed me that a non-entertainment site is his first line of research: findlaw.com and its search engine, lawcrawler.findlaw.com. Digging into Findlaw, one can discover that it has a rather large entertainment law and news component at its Entertainment and Sports page (found at www.findlaw.com/01topics/12entertainsport). Attorneys can also subscribe to free weekly entertainment and sports law newsletters, which are delivered via e-mail by signing up at http://newsletters.findlaw.com/sample/elegal.html and http://newsletters.findlaw.com/sample/sports.html).

 

The Guilds
Transactional entertainment lawyers spend a lot of time drafting agreements and forms. Finding a good source of sample forms can speed the process. For general business forms, the ‘Lectric Law Library (found at http://lectlaw.com/form.html), a site with forms that can be accessed for free and according to a fee structure, is favored by the network vice president. For entertainment- specific forms and agreements, the sites of the major Hollywood creative guilds should be consulted. The Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild offer their agreements and signatory agency lists online. The DGA and WGA also make their minimum pay scale available. The WGA and SAG offer searchable databases to determine whether a production was produced under a contract from the respective guild (although the results do not include the name of the guild signatory that produced the work). The DGA also offers a variety of forms, such as deal memos, signatory compliance forms, and residual reporting forms. Additionally, the site offers a searchable database of guild members.

 

Trademark & Copyright Searching
Intellectual property law, especially in copyrights and trademarks, is a large component of entertainment law. For a basic trademark search, Kaiser searches the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site (www.uspto.gov). Although she would not file a trademark application after searching only this site, a starting search at the trademark office gives her a sense of whether it is a good idea to conduct a full search at a pay site such as Thompson & Thompson (http://www.t-tlaw.com/trademarks.htm). Those delving into copyright issues, such as registrations and ownership documents, have a Web-based alternative to the dreaded dial-up LOCIS search system. The Web-based system, found at http://www.copyright.gov/records/, comprises three databases:

• a catch-all of books, film, maps,music, etc.
• serials
• documents (for assignor or assignee searches)

 

The databases go back to 1978, but it may take recent registrations several months to appear. The book and serials databases are searchable by author, title, and claimant, among other categories. For further inquiries, users can send e-mail or chat with the library’s virtual librarian at www.loc.gov/rr/askalib.

 

Performing Rights Organizations
Attorneys in the music industry can bookmark the following sites to link to countless music publishing, U.S. copyright and licensing, and songwriting and music rights resources: the National Music Publisher’s Association’s links page (www.nmpa.org/links.html), Kohn on Music Licensing (http://kohnmusic.com), and Worldwide Internet Music Resources at the Indiana University School of Music (at www.music.indiana.edu/music_resources).

 

The sites of performing rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI have databases of licensed song titles that can be searched for free. The ASCAP site (www.ascap.com) offers its ACE database that can be searched by title, performers, or writers, and it will display the contact data of the appropriate publishers. BMI’s site offers a similar online tool (www.bmi.com) that may be found by clicking on the "Search" link on the top of the site's homepage.

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Government Sites & Trade Associations
Government Web sites and trade association sites are useful sources for uncovering laws and regulations. For example, Kaiser recommends the FCC Web site for links to basic broadcast regulations (www.fcc.gov/oet/info/rules). A search of the agency’s site (rather than the entire Code of Federal Regulations) is a more targeted and efficient manner of searching for regulations. Most of the legal documents on the site of the National Association of Broadcasters are for members only, but the NAB does provide access to its filings in recent FCC dockets. The NAB also has an extensive links page for broadcast and telecommunications industry Web sites. This page is available to non-members (at www.nab.org/irc/virtual/broadcast_industry_sites.asp).

 

Litigators who need to keep abreast of rulings, motions, new filings, and appellate decisions affecting the entertainment industry can subscribe to the Entertainment Law Digest site (www.entlawdigest.com) for $495 annually (lower cost student and sole practitioner rates and discount trial subscriptions are available at http://www.entlawdigest.com/subscribe.cfm). This site is based in Los Angeles.

 

Entertainment attorneys who regularly make phone calls to people outside the United States should bookmark timeanddate.com/worldclock. The cable network vice president calls offices worldwide, and he touts this site because it saves him the embarrassment of calling in the middle of the night. Mere embarrassment is not the worst that can happen; people have been fired for calling a celebrity in the middle of the night.

 

Related Diversions
For those looking for some entertainment rather than news of the entertainment industry, users can visit Findlaw’s FBI celebrity files (http://news.findlaw.com/), Mugshots.org for postings of celebrity mug shots (http://mugshots.org), and the famous Smoking Gun site (www.thesmokinggun.com), which “brings you exclusive documents—cool, con-fidential, quirky—that can’t be found elsewhere on the Web.” For example, read the contract riders of various performers: Kansas demands prune juice; Janet Jackson must have an arrangement of tulips, roses, gardenias, and lilies.

 

Two other popular sites Dishings.com and Ifcome.com that took a more "gossipy/insider's" take on the legal affairs side of the entertainment business have disappeared from the Internet.