UCLA Entertainment Law Review

Child influencers are a large part of social media’s advertising success. Child influencers earn millions each year, with the most successful of them earning upwards of $29 million. They make their money from sponsored content and monetizing their social media platforms. Currently, child influencers have no legal rights through traditional child labor laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 or state-based child actor laws. Only one state—Illinois—has passed legislation specifically targeted at protecting child influencers. As a result, the risk of financial, physical, and psychological exploitation of child influencers is one that cannot be ignored. Because of the rapid expansion of child influencers and the lack of regulation or legislation to prevent the exploitation of these children, Congress must enact federal legislation to ensure the safety of children across the nation.

This Article addresses the fact that child influencers are working and should thus be afforded protection through a child labor regime. Additionally, this Article details how child influencers face their own unique risks—apart from other traditional child employment—which requires tailored laws. Specifically, this Article proposes federal legislation that would help solve financial exploitation of child influencers by requiring 15 percent of the worker’s earnings to be put into a trust account. Further, the proposed legislation provides production regulations that ensures child influencers remain in school, imposes restrictions on the number of hours child influencers can work, and requires parental involvement in advertising campaigns that occur outside of the home.

The video game industry has long been characterized by game developers borrowing gameplay features from earlier releases to develop their own new and innovative games. This practice has persisted due to the widespread belief that the rules of video games are excluded from copyright protection under § 102(b) of the Copyright Act, either for being too abstract or for having a functional nature. This Article is the first scholarly work to argue that this belief is mistaken and that none of the § 102(b) exclusions categorically apply to such rules. Specifically, it proposes that most video game rules are in fact eligible for “thin” copyright protection, and that such protection would strike an appropriate balance between incentivizing creativity and permitting competition in the industry. This Article concludes that such a copyright would provide improved legal clarity and a reliable means of preventing video game “cloning,” which does not exist in the status quo.

Since becoming exercisable in 2013, termination of transfer rights under section 203 of the Copyright Act have had little impact on the music industry as a whole. Recent class-action lawsuits by recording artists have sought to change that. In the final substantive opinion on the matter, the Second Circuit expressed the necessity of evaluating termination and possible defenses on a case-by-case basis. It may not be the win recording artists were hoping for, but it leaves the door open for them to regain their copyrights; and, for the moment, puts to rest the claim that all sound recordings are works made for hire. This Article surveys the implications of case-by-case work made for hire determinations on the viability of sound recording reversion attempts by recording artists going forward. This Article also explores the variety of ways in which record labels have tried and will continue to try to stave off the termination attempts by artists. This Article concludes with suggestions to make section 203 more accessible to artists while also reducing risk for record labels and other assignees.

As the emergence of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rights continues to redefine the legal environment of college athletics, many experts and commentators have turned their attention to student-athlete unionization, arguing both for or against classifying student-athletes as employees under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. However, few commentators have addressed a critical observation that this Article finds indispensable to a well-functioning narrative among students, student-athletes, and employees: not all athletic programs are the same. In fact, many of these programs are so different from one another that focusing on the “forest” of unionization might gravely ignore the “trees” that characterize these complex groups of institutions.

In response, this Article aims to facilitate a more complete discussion between students, student-athletes, and employees by highlighting one group of institutions whose barrier to student-athlete unionization is very different from those of other institutions: the Ivy League. As this Article attempts to demonstrate, Ivy League athletic programs are institutionally unique in ways that mitigate the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s concerns to grant “employee” status in other cases—namely that doing so will disrupt the balance of labor relations or financially imperil the affected universities. On these observations, this Article posits that notwithstanding the arguably questionable merits of student-athlete unionization, the Ivy League offers a uniquely promising “test site” in which to probe the practical consequences of classifying student-athletes as employees and derive valuable insights that could inform similar proposals at other institutions.

While this Comment cannot tackle the extensive breadth of behaviors and concerns potentially stemming from the revocation of the Paramount Decrees, it does take a look at the most salient changes in the film industry since the investigation into and revocation of the Decrees. Part II provides a brief overview of the 1948 Paramount action and the resulting consent decrees, and Part III covers the government’s justifications for revoking the Decrees in 2020. Part IV analyzes major changes in the film industry since the revocation, and finally, Part V examines how some of these changes could lead to consumer harm in light of the revocation, taking particular note of the resurgence of block booking and circuit dealing in theaters and the open-ended question of how streaming fits into the picture.