The artist Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson) leaves behind, not only a legacy of music and pop culture, but also a legal legacy dealing with contract law, copyright litigation, and the law related to name changes. Prince’s famous name change in the 1990s during a contractual fight with Warner Brothers is legendary. He changed his name to a glyph that merged the symbols for man and woman and was also the title of his most recent album. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the fourth-boldest career move in rock history. Frustrated because Warner Bros. refused to accommodate his prolific ways, he took to appearing in public with the word slave written on his face. After the name change, he no longer considered himself a slave, and released the album Emancipation that he said was based on his studies “of the Egyptians, the building of the pyramids and how the pyramids were related to the constellations. They were a message from the Egyptians about how civilization really started.” The name change had Warner Brothers scrambling to send out font software so reporters could incorporate the symbol into stories. Many of those writing about the musician just found it easier to speak about him as “the artist formerly known as Prince.” Years later, Prince reclaimed his name and began a series of dealings with various record labels and in 2014 struck a landmark deal with Warner brothers regaining control over his back catalog. The effort was in large part aided by an aspect of copyright law that allows authors to grab back rights from publishers after 35 years.

Internet searches for classic recordings like Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day and Sign o’ the Times yield few results whether on top streaming venues like Spotify and Rhapsody or other outlets like Tidal that boast an extensive catalog. This scarcity is a testament to the fierce and independent nature of this musician. When Napster appeared on the scene and more recently, Prince was so protective of his music copyrights that he wanted to change the law to stop other artists from covering his songs. When another artist who uploaded to YouTube a 29-second clip of her infant dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” he directed Universal Music, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to send a takedown notice to YouTube, which led to a lawsuit in 2007. In 2015, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that copyright holders must consider fair use when sending takedowns. See Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015). In 2014, his efforts to protect his music copyrights led to his suing 22 Facebook users for linking to bootlegs of his recordings. The lawsuit was withdrawn as he later explained to the BBC, “Nobody sues their fans … I have some bootlegs of Lianne [La Havas] but I wouldn’t sell them. But fans sharing music with each other, that’s cool.”

See the Brooklyn Law Library item Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet by Jessica Litman (Call # KF3030.1 .L58 2001) which tells how copyright lobbyists succeeded in persuading Congress to enact laws greatly expanding copyright owners’ control over individuals’ private uses of their works. The efforts to enforce these new rights have resulted in highly publicized legal battles between established media and new upstarts. The author, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, argues that the 1998 copyright law as an incoherent patchwork and that there is a needfor reforms that reflect common sense and the way people actually behave in their daily digital interactions.

Brooklyn Law School Library has many titles on securities arbitration. The Practitioner’s Guide to Securities Arbitration by Jason R. Doss and Richard S. Frankowski (Call No. KF1070.5 .D67 2013), published by the American Bar Association, is the most recent in the collection. The book is easy to understand with the knowledge of the authors making it useful for law students and attorneys planning on practicing securities law. The book shows how customer disputes are litigated in the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) arbitration process. Investors who are victims of bad investment advice or financial fraud often do not understand how their money is invested or the associated risks of those investments. Surprisingly few cases are filed against the securities industry despite widespread investment abuses. The book discusses practices and procedures including defenses and gives information for mastering tactics used in FINRA arbitration. Sections include: Defining the players in a securities arbitration case; Time limitations and other deadlines; Common claims; Bringing and defending claims, arbitrators and motion practice; Discovery and hearing practice and procedures.

Arbitration of legal disputes has advantages and disadvantages. Proponents argue that it is a cheaper than litigation to resolve disputes. Arbitrators do not have big caseloads, resulting in quicker final decisions. They are selected by agreement of both parties, so that in many cases, no one party controls who the arbitrator will be. Appealing arbitration rulings is difficult, even if an arbitrator makes glaring mistakes. This finality can be a positive factor ending a dispute so the parties can move on. Arbitration eliminates time-consuming and expensive tools of litigation. Arbitration hearings do not take place in open court and transcripts are not part of the public record. This can be very valuable for parties in some cases.

Critics cite the cost factor can as a “con” as arbitration does not always reduce costs. Consumers question the fairness of arbitration over a minor issue that could be resolved in small claims court. Companies favoring arbitration are often familiar with specific arbitrators and the process in general. Arbitration hearings are not always faster than litigation. Depending on the terms in a contract, the location of the hearing may be inconvenient to the average consumer, raising costs and time off from work. Finality of arbitration rulings, even if an arbitrator has made a blatant mistake, can result in an unfair result with only a small chance that a court can correct it. With no jury, consumers see arbitration as unfair, leaving matters to an arbitrator, who plays the role of both judge and jury.

Another disadvantage is discussed in a Law360 article, FINRA Arbitration Beset with Unpaid Awards, Report Says, citing a recent report by the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PAIBA) saying that nearly one third of awards won by investors in arbitration go unpaid by brokers. PAIBA is calling on FINRA to create a national recovery pool. The report strongly criticized FINRA’s lack of data on award payments, suggesting the self-regulatory organization should do more to protect investors. For the year 2013, the PIABA report said there were 75 awards issued in 2013 that went unpaid. The total awards to investors was $256,749,289, with $62.1 million of unpaid awards comprising 24.2 percent of the total. The reports asks FINRA to require firms to obtain insurance and meet more stringent capital requirements and have a recovery pool to pay investors if firms dodge payment which It said would be the “best, least expensive option” to satisfy unpaid awards for investors. The report concludes “Allowing one in three awards to go unpaid is unconscionable. FINRA’s cures: barring from the industry those who fail to pay awards, and notifying claimants that they can pursue actions in court against former FINRA members, have failed to cure, or put a meaningful dent in, the problem. Steps must therefore be taken to put forth a new division of FINRA to craft and administer a National Recovery Pool.”

The Brooklyn Law School Library New Books List for November 11, 2015 has 88 items with 65 print volumes and 23 e-books. The entries cover a wide range of subjects from Lotteries (American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age) to Discrimination in Criminal Justice (Crime, Inequality and Power) to Prostitution (Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law) to Freedom of Expression (Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights) to Race Relations (Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State).

Also included is The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (Call # HJ2336 .Z8313 2015) by Gabriel Zucman (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan from the French original Richesse Cachée des Nations and with a foreword by noted economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century). This slim 129 page book claims to be the “the first serious economic research” into tax haven activity and an important work that anyone interested in tax havens, social justice, defeating inequality and delivering tax reform should read. The author is a French economist based at the University of California, Berkeley, and part of a network of doing valuable work on inequality, wealth, tax and the difficulties caused by the uneven distribution of capital resources in society. Although the book fails to define what a tax haven is, it does set out a campaign on tax havens in the second half of this book which makes a lot of sense. The book recommends the creation of a global register of financial asset wealth holding. This suggestion could be a practical and necessary step in the assembly of the data needed for the global wealth tax proposed in his book.

Whether country-by-country reporting can be an effective foundation for a taxation of multinational corporations is an open question. Country-by-country reporting may well permit tax authorities to determine what proportion of the sales, employees and assets of a multinational corporation are located in its jurisdiction. Similarly, if a global register of wealth could be established, the data needed to tax global wealth would have been created. The book is worth reading of its vision of an activist committed to promoting a new and radical solution that he has identified. Not many academics take on the role of the public intellectual who demands action to address a problem that they have identified. This one does.

Readers interested on this topic may want to view The Price We Pay, a documentary inspired by another French book La Crise Fiscale qui Vient. Director Harold Crooks looks at the dirty world of corporate malfeasance and the dark history and dire present-day reality of big-business tax avoidance, which has seen multinationals depriving governments of trillions of dollars in tax revenues by harboring profits in offshore havens. Tax havens, originally created by London bankers in the 50s, today put over half the world’s stock of money beyond reach of public treasuries. Nation states are being reshaped by this offshoring of the world’s wealth. Tax avoidance by big corporations and the wealthy is paving the way to historic levels of inequality and placing the tax burden on the middle class and the poor. Crusading journalists, tax justice campaigners and former finance and technology industry insiders speak frankly about the  trends carrying the Western world to an unsustainable future.