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A Florida radio station ran billboards (pictured above) showing Britney Spears and one of the station’s DJs, suggesting that she and DJ were ‘nuts.’ Ms. Spears contested the use. The radio station is pulling the billboards. Unfortunately, the Smoking Gun has printed only one of Britney’s lawyers letters, not the one that contains ‘many legal authorities.’ However this letter does site Florida statutes and law. Interestingly, the two cases cited do not apply to media defendants.
There is some precedent for media defendants to utilize someone’s name or likeness if the person was the subject of the media’s product. In Velez v. VV Pub. Corp., the Village Voice used an unflattering photo of local politico Ramon Velez (a subject of Voice exposes), in an advertisement for the Voice. The use of the photo fairly represented the Voice’s news coverage. 135 A.D.2d 47, 50, 524 N.Y.S.2d 186, 187 (1st Dept. 1988) (“[T]he incidental use in an advertisement by a news disseminator of a person’s name or identity does not violate the statutory proscription, if it had previously published the item exhibited as a matter of public interest.”
In Montana v San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper sold posters of Joe Montana following a Super Bowl victory, which posters were held to have news value due to their ‘relatively contemporaneous’ publication. Because the use was in connection with merchandise rather than a mere advertisement for the newspaper, this ruling seems like a bit of an outlier. 34 Cal.App.4th 790 (1995).
See more discussion by Stanford University Library here.
If you’re aware of Florida caselaw that would suggest how a media defendant using a name or likeness in advertisement for its services might fare, send it on in.

Today’s WSJ has a special section entitled “All Things Digital” that is a must-read for many reasons. From an interview with the CEOs of Viacom and Google we get the following:
Mr. Daumann (CEO of Viacom): The DMCA was not intended to cover a company that is in the media business that has knowledge of the copyright violation. [It was intended to cover] companies that are involved in the building blocks of the Internet – routing, caching, all the rest. I go to every media conference and I see these guys [Google]. They’re a media company. So that’s great. They can create their own content. They can have user-generated content.
. . .
Mr. Schmidt (CEO of Google): . . . As we read the law, it is pretty clear that there is a safe haven for sites on the Internet that host content that is incorrectly or illegally uploaded, as long as they take it down promptly. And indeed we do that. We are busy building tools that will automate as much of that process as we possibly can, because it is crazy having people doing this stuff manually . . . [Viacom] should have waited for the tools.

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China Daily: Pepsi Loses Lawsuit to Small Brewery Over Infringement :
“The high court of East China’s Zhejiang Province reversed the first verdict of the lower court and decided in favor of a local small-sized brewery to claim 3 million yuan as compensation against Pepsi Cola over trademark infringement, China Intellectual Property News reported.
Lanye, a small beer producer located in a mountainous area in the province accused the multinational beverage giant of infringing its trademark named “blue storm” and asked Pepsi for a public statement to clarify Lanye is the original user of the trademark.”
Background here.
More discussion here.

PC Mag:” YouTube to Finally Test Copyright Tech“:
“Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world’s largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.”