Lecturer Bios
Rick Kurnit, Esq.
Rick Kurnit has over thirty years experience in the advertising and marketing services and publishing industries, representing advertisers, advertising agencies, public relations, promotion, and publishing companies.
Rick is Vice Chair of the ABA Committee on Private Advertising Litigation. He has handled many of the leading cases defining the application of intellectual property law to advertising and marketing communications, including representing the defendants in the Vanna White, Woody Allen, and Jackie Onassis look-alike cases; Viking Press, Nelson DeMille, Terry McMillan, and other authors and publishers in libel cases based on works of fiction; Prodigy in the Stratton Oakmont case and other cases defining online liability; John Deere in defining use of trademarks in comparative advertising; the maker of a smaller copy of the necklace from Titanic in defining the scope of parallel marketing; and "Gone With The Wind" in defining parody and copyright infringement. Rick has also handled numerous Lanham Act and comparative advertising cases and NAD challenges.
In addition to all aspects of marketing communications, Rick advises companies and individuals on mergers, acquisitions, succession plans, employment agreements, partnership agreements, and phantom equity plans.
Rick teaches advertising and intellectual property law and lectures regularly for the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Promotion Marketing Association, the Association of National Advertisers, the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and the American Law Institute/American Bar Association. He has repeatedly been a guest lecturer at Beijing University; Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Fordham, New York and Cardozo Law Schools; and conferences in Asia, Europe, and North America. He is a member of the Boards of The Miami Ad School, The Art Directors Club, and The Advertising Compliance Service.
Rick’s published works include: the Advertising Law chapter in Corporate Legal Departments (2011); "Exclusivity of Sponsors" in Journal of Sponsorship 379 (2010); The Legal Side of the Creative Process, a chapter in Advertising and Marketing Law (2005); “Restricting Speech on the Internet,” a panel discussion, 8 Fordham Intel. Prop. Media L. J. 395 (1998); “Liability Online,” 1 Journal of Internet Law 15 (1998); “Pornography on the Internet,” a panel discussion, 14 Cardozo Arts and Ent. L. J. 343 (1996); “Right of Publicity in the Year 2020,” a symposium, 20 Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and Arts 1 (1995); and “Libel Claims Based on Fiction,” 51 Brooklyn L. Rev. 401(1985).
Rick served as law clerk to Federal Judge Thomas P. Griesa, and was associated for five years with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He is a graduate of Columbia College (AB, magna cum laude, 1972) Phi Beta Kappa, and Harvard Law School (JD, cum laude, 1975).
Thomas A. Crowell, Esq.
Thomas A. Crowell, Esq. counsels clients on intellectual property matters and a broad spectrum of legal issues across media sectors including publishing, film, television, merchandising, licensing, music, video games, manufacturing, and the graphic arts. A seasoned negotiator, he leads deals for client programming featured on networks such as Nickelodeon, Discovery, Starz, DIY Network, TLC, SyFy, WE, and the Smithsonian Channel. With extensive experience in both narrative and unscripted television, he has also collaborated with the Dominican Republic Film Commission to help harmonize the country’s motion picture legislation with that of the United States.
Crowell represents several comic book publishing companies as well as many of the industry’s most notable artists and writers. He is the co-creator and former Director from Practice of The Indie Film Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and the Executive Director, emeritus, of New Jersey Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Since 2015, he has taught continuing legal education courses on comic book legal practice at NY Comic Con and numerous other conventions nationwide. He currently serves as the copyright, intellectual property, and media law professor at CUNY School of Law in New York City.
An avid writer, Crowell is the series editor of Focal Press’s “Pocket Lawyer for…” series of legal guides for artists and the author of The Pocket Lawyer for Filmmakers (Focal Press, 3rd ed. 2024) and The Pocket Lawyer for Comic Book Creators, the first dedicated legal guide to the comic book industry. He is also a contributing author for LexisNexis in its entertainment law division.
Before entering the legal profession, Crowell worked as a television reporter, producer, and production executive, and later served as the Director of Business and Program Development for The Science Technology Network. He has written comics for Waxwork Comics and created the 1990s children’s television show Professor Potto’s Videolabs, which received the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval.
More information about his lectures and publications is available at his website:
www.thomascrowell.com
Thomas D. Selz, Esq.
Thomas D. Selz is a founding partner of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz focusing on all aspects of entertainment law. Mr. Selz's practice includes advising on documentary film, fictional and fiction-based-on-fact feature films, television pilots, tv series and miniseries, live stage productions, publishing, music publishing and sound recording, and clearance work for problematic material to make the product acceptable to networks, publishers and Errors and Omissions insurance carriers.
Mr. Selz also counsels clients on copyright (including issues relating to termination and renewal rights under the 1976 Copyright Act and its amendments, and the 1909 Copyright Act) and trademarks, from clearance searches, to deciding which classes to file in, to registering as Intent to Use or based on actual use, and reminding clients about the need for additional filings are necessary with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
In addition to transactional work from collaboration agreements and development through production and distribution, Mr. Selz focuses on mergers and acquisitions, secured transactions, private placements and public offerings, including crowd-funding laws and regulations. Mr. Selz has set up an international network of attorneys to assist each other with issues raised by the cross-border reach of Internet crowd-funding. Mr. Selz also regularly advises on complex corporate work involving entertainment industry and intellectual property assets.
For more than three decades, Mr. Selz has also helped structure domestic and international tax-advantaged financing for motion picture and television productions. In the US, Mr. Selz was one of the first to see the potential for combining state production incentives with the benefits for investors under Section 181 of the Internal Revenue Code, and Mr. Selz has advised clients about extensions to Section 181 as they have occurred. Mr. Selz has also taken the lead on behalf of the US videogame industry in extending the benefits of Section 181 to videogame development and production, particularly as such activities involve tax issues arising from crowd-sourced funding. Working with local counsel, Mr. Selz helped devise financing structures that are now used throughout the industry to permit clients to overcome substantial regulatory and business risks to be able to draw on funds from countries outside the US, including Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Germany and Hungary. He co-authored the US Incentives chapter of the Film Finance Handbook: How to Fund Your Film (Netribution, 2007).
Mr. Selz is a contributing editor to Entertainment, Law and Finance. He is co-author of the Entertainment Law Treatise, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Editions, Shepard's/ McGraw-Hill, 1983-2008, and was co-author of Entertainment Law, Casebook, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Editions, Lexis/Nexis, 1984, 1997, 2003. Mr. Selz is Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School (1998-present), and prior to that he was Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law (1977-1993). Mr. Selz was a director of the Independent Feature Project (1986 - 2001), and served as General Counsel to the organization (1986-2008).
Mr. Selz has been quoted in Bloomberg on the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action settlement, and in Financial Times on TiVo’s plan to allow customers to transfer television programs to Apple's iPod. He was also quoted in The New York Times and other publications on the posting to the Internet of "Gone With the Wind" by the Australian affiliate of Project Gutenberg in violation of U.S. copyright law.
Prior to founding the firm, Mr. Selz worked in the entertainment department at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and was associated with Emil, Kobrin, Klein & Garbus for three years. He is admitted to practice in New York.
To learn more about Mr. Selz visit his website http://fkks.com/attorneys/thomas-selz.
