Mark J. Fiore is counsel in the Intellectual Property & Media practice group in the New York office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. Mr. Fiore has broad experience in a range of intellectual property and media matters, including copyright, trademark, unfair competition, Internet, and First Amendment issues.
Mr. Fiore worked on the successful defense of eBay against trademark infringement and related claims brought by jeweler Tiffany & Co. involving allegedly counterfeit goods sold over the Internet. In July 2008, following trial, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected all of Tiffany’s claims. Mr. Fiore has been involved with numerous other matters for eBay, including a successful defense against a preliminary injunction motion brought by fashion designer Nanette Lepore and a copyright litigation involving the parameters of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the scope of the “first-sale doctrine.” Mr. Fiore is currently defending eBay in various litigations brought by eBay users alleging that they were improperly suspended from eBay and asserting a variety of contract and tort claims.
Additional matters in which Mr. Fiore has been involved include representations of:
- The Walt Disney Company as intellectual property counsel in its $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment Inc., a deal that gives Disney the rights to more than 5,000 Marvel characters, including Spider Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, Captain America, and Fantastic Four;
- Bertelsmann in defense of a series of lawsuits resulting in successful settlements in the single largest copyright infringement case in U.S. history; as part of the litigation, Mr. Fiore helped obtain a judgment from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit regarding the scope of the “crime-fraud exception” to the attorney-client privilege;
- XM Satellite Radio in a proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Board, which issued a favorable result on behalf of XM and Sirius Satellite Radio regarding the royalty rate for copyright licenses covering performances of recorded music on satellite radio;
- McGraw-Hill and its Standard & Poor’s subsidiary in a series of ongoing litigations in federal and state court involving protection of the S&P 500 Index and related intellectual property;
- Sterling Jewelers Inc. in enforcing its copyright and trademark rights against entities selling jewelry items that infringe Sterling’s “Open Hearts by Jane Seymour” jewelry collection; the enforcement efforts have included multiple litigations resulting in consent judgments in favor of Sterling.
Other areas to which Mr. Fiore has focused his practice include: copyright litigation and counseling services for such online entities as Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace; filing of Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the Association of American Publishers addressing First Amendment issues; defense of a national building products company in a trademark infringement litigation; and negotiating and drafting of intellectual property agreements on behalf of an international corporation.
Mr. Fiore has given presentations and published several articles on a variety of intellectual property and media issues. In March 2009, he presented in a program sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York entitled “Pirates and Protocols: Trademark Use and Protection on the Internet.” He also spoke in July 2007 at a seminar sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship on “the nuts and bolts of copyrights and trademarks.” In December 2006, he participated in a panel sponsored by the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. regarding copyright issues arising from “user-generated content” such as video files posted to YouTube. Mr. Fiore also has guest-lectured on contributory and vicarious trademark infringement at St. John’s University School of Law, in April 2009 and February 2008.
In addition to his intellectual property and media practice, Mr. Fiore actively works on pro bono matters, including in connection with Sanctuary for Families. In May 2008, he successfully argued an appeal before the New York Appellate Division regarding the authority of the New York Family Court to issue orders of protection that cover same-sex domestic partners. In recognition of his efforts, Sanctuary for Families awarded him a 2008 Above & Beyond Pro Bono Achievement Award.
Mr. Fiore graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2002, where he was a recipient of the James Wilson Scholarship. Mr. Fiore served as a member of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and is the author of “Trampling the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’: The Case Against Extending Hazelwood to College Campuses,” 150 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1915 (2002). Mr. Fiore is admitted to practice in the state courts of New York and in the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.