Free Legal Advice For Artists

Josh Wattles

Joshua S. Wattles has a distinguished decades-long career as an attorney, business executive and law professor in the entertainment, communications and technology sectors. Most recently, he was Advisor-in-Chief to DeviantArt.com, an online community for visual artists and their user-generated content ranked by traffic as one of the top 150 websites in the world, where he spearheaded its successful multi-million dollar acquisition by Wix.com (NASDAQ). Mr. Wattles has a varied career as a lawyer, executive and academic in the film, television, music, visual art, Internet and technology fields. He was the deputy and acting general counsel of Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, where he worked for eleven years starting in 1981, he was responsible for the studio’s highest profile talent and content agreements as well as major litigations. He advised the Chairman and all division Presidents on legal matters and managed the more than 60 lawyers operating throughout the company. His litigation experience includes managing the infamous Art Buchwald “net profits” case brought against Paramount on the film “Coming to America.” He was also the senior intellectual property lawyer for Paramount Communications advising film, book publishing, sports and cable television units and was a key architect of the film industry’s anti-piracy programs in the transition to videocassettes. With executives at Universal Pictures, he created the industry’s collective licensing organization for cable and satellite retransmissions of television programs and films in the EU. Josh Wattles’ background in the music industry began right out of law school as an in-house litigator for the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) where he worked on the first Copyright Royalty Tribunal proceedings in the United States. At Paramount, concurrently with his legal positions, he ran all of its music operations including the production of soundtracks and its significant music publishing interests, The Famous Music Publishing Companies. He acquired the Duke Ellington catalog and doubled the gross and net revenues of the publishing companies. He helped create the business and legal structure for the modern film soundtrack with the groundbreaking contributions of Flashdance, Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and numerous others. He shared responsibility for breaking the longest running number 1 single in history, End of the Road, by Boyz 2 Men. After twelve years at the studio, Mr. Wattles became involved in a number of early-stage Internet ventures. He is the founding President of Mixonic.com, an on-line CD and DVD replication company, sold last year to a long time competitor, and he designed and developed the strategy and technology for the most disruptive play the ringtone space, Xingtone, subsequently funded and acquired by Siemens AG. His association with DeviantArt as its chief business and legal advisor began as a pro bono project at the very beginning of the website’s launch 18 years ago. Hejoined DeviantArt full time nine years ago. In his private legal practice, Mr. Wattles was of counsel most recently to Bingham, McCutchen, then a large international firm. His clients over the years include major studios, such as MGM, Fox and Televisa as well as prominent artists including J.K.Rowling, the author and creator of Harry Potter. He participated in MGM v. Grokster, an attack on open Internet distribution of content which progressed to the United States Supreme Court, in which he represented the opposite side to the entertainment industry as counsel to LimeWire and to the developers of the Gnutella protocols who appeared together as amicus. He also represented Michael Robertson, a prominent technology entrepreneur, in copyright litigations with the music industry. He was the lead entertainment and copyright lawyer on Televisa’s litigation team in a significant contract and copyright case against Univision that went to trial in Los Angeles. Mr. Wattles is a Lecturer in Law in Advanced Copyright at USC’s Gould School of Law and previously taught, as an adjunct, the copyright course at Southwestern University Law School and at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He has also taught full courses in Entertainment Law, in Art Law and in Music Publishing Law. He continues to lecture and speak at many other schools and professional organizations, most recently as an invited panelist at the ABA 33rd Annual Intellectual Law Conference held in Arlington, VA. His presentation on Fan Art Law at Comic Con International has over 180,000 views on YouTube. He is past President of the Los Angeles Copyright Society. Before attending law school and as an activist artist, he was co-founder of one of the very first programs providing legal services to artists, Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, which morphed into Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. Mr. Wattles’ law degree is from George Washington University Law School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Mills College in Oakland, California, cum laude, in American Studies, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and is still distinguished as the only male ever awarded an undergraduate degree by the college.  Mr. Wattles also attended the University of California, Berkeley.  He is admitted to practice to the Bars of California (active) and New York (inactive). Contact: Joshua Wattles joshuawattles@gmail.com