As the media industry undergoes rapid transformation, the evolving world of media law becomes ever more challenging to anyone who publishes or shares information. BakerHostetler’s media law legacy goes back nearly 100 years, giving us unparalleled experience that results in continued precedent-setting victories today.
Clients, ranging from newspapers and electronic media that publish nationally to digital providers whose information and potential for legal action go viral in seconds, turn to us to resolve the toughest cases in the field, including those on the cutting edge of adapting media and libel law to the realities of the online information age.
We use our experience to go beyond precedent in order to shape and advance the state of law for the long-term interests of the communications industry, winning hundreds of cases on summary judgment, at trial, or on appeal. We have represented world-class authors such as President Bill Clinton, and won copyright infringement and libel cases on behalf of novelist John Grisham, Barbara Bush, and other noted authors. We also succeeded in the seminal New York Times case that extended opinion protection to book reviews.
Our attorneys help clients navigate digital distribution as it creates new legal ramifications for copyright, privacy, intellectual property, and libel law, especially with the advent of social media, comments and other third-party content. For example, in Shirley Sherrod v. Andrew Breitbart, et al., we are defending a blogger accused of posting deceptively edited content online. We also are representing the defendant in a defamation action in one of the first cases to tackle the issue of reasonable expectation of privacy when a website repurposes and comments on photos posted on Facebook. We were among the first attorneys to question whether the special vernacular and content of the Internet should be governed by the same law that controls language in traditional media.