Benjamin E. Marks is a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and a member of the firm’s Intellectual Property & Media practice. His areas of concentration include copyright, trademark, misappropriation, music licensing, unfair competition, and First Amendment issues.
Mr. Marks has litigated a wide variety of intellectual property and other cases for clients such as The McGraw-Hill Companies, The Walt Disney Company, ABC, the Television Music License Committee, and Bertelsmann. Mr. Marks has represented The McGraw-Hill Companies and its Standard & Poor’s subsidiary for many years in disputes concerning the unauthorized use of the S&P 500 Index as the basis of financial products, including most recently in Standard & Poor’s successful litigation against the International Securities Exchange and the Options Clearing Corporation to enjoin the unlicensed offering of options on the S&P 500. In 2010, Mr. Marks was the lead trial counsel for Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley in their “hot news” misappropriation and copyright infringement litigation against Theflyonthewall.com.
Mr. Marks frequently represents music users such as television stations, television networks, and web site operators in connection with the acquisition of, and litigation over, rights to publicly perform musical compositions. In 2010, Mr. Marks successfully represented DMX, a leading background/foreground music service provider, in a pair of copyright rate trials that resulted in a new blanket license fee structure for DMX, and which substantially lowered the fees DMX is required to pay to ASCAP and BMI for the rights to perform the music in their respective repertories. Mr. Marks also recently represented the local television industry in copyright rate proceedings against ASCAP and BMI.
Mr. Marks has published articles on copyright, trademark, and the First Amendment in publications such as the New York University Law Review, Bright Ideas and the Journal of Proprietary Rights. He is a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., the Legal Advisory Committee of the Student Press Law Center, the First Amendment & Media Committee of the American Bar Association, and the Lawyers Committee of the Association of American Publishers. He also is the Chair of the Board of Directors of Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, a non-profit arts organization that teaches documentary filmmaking to New York City teens. In fall 2013, Mr. Marks will teach a course on intellectual property litigation at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Mr. Marks graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his J.D. from New York University, where he served as an articles editor of the New York University Law Review. Mr. Marks was recognized as an “Up and Coming” Intellectual Property lawyer by Chambers USA in 2012 and 2013, and also has been recognized as a recommended lawyer for IP – Trademark Litigation and IP – Copyright by Legal 500 US.