By Lauren Isagholian, interviewing Nick Huskins.
Nick Huskins, Senior Corporate Counsel for IP at Amazon Studios and Prime Video has built a distinguished career at the intersection of entertainment and intellectual property (IP) law. His legal career began at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where, after taking a few entertainment classes, he quickly discovered an overlap between his entertainment and intellectual property classes that led him to pursue a dual concentration in entertainment and IP law. Before transitioning to Amazon, Huskins gained extensive experience in trademark and copyright litigation at Glaser Weil, a California-based IP litigation firm, where he represented mostly entertainment clients such as Morgan Creek Entertainment, the BBC, and Conan O’Brien.
Starting his career at a firm before moving in-house, Huskins spoke about a few challenges he faced starting within the IP field, which included having to recalibrate what in-house practice looked like instead of litigation practice. Moving to in-house practice and joining Amazon almost eight years ago, this was a pivotal time as Amazon was “just getting into original content, so there was…a little bit of a startup mentality but having resources that a true production company startup wouldn’t have,” Huskins said, emphasizing the reason why he wanted to work at Amazon as compared to other production companies. Huskins also highlighted that he was only the second attorney hired on the team and got to expand that practice together.
On leadership, Huskins talked about his day-to-day work and what his team looks like as an IP Professional, which mainly includes escalations and client meetings. “There are legal professionals on my team that are handling copyright recordations and registrations. There are legal professionals on my team handling the day-in and day-out prosecution work for trademarks, and there are legal professionals on my team handling clearance work, whether that’s title clearance or traditional trademark clearance or marking clearances, production, etc.” In addition, Huskins deals with development and production legal quite a bit. The development legal side “handles our rights deals, our talent engagement deals, our co-production agreements, and those often have a lot of IP terms and those are often heavily negotiated, so when it comes to IP terms and our production and rights agreements, I [Huskins] will often negotiate those.” Huskins emphasized that his work is dynamic and unpredictable, which keeps the role engaging and intellectually stimulating.
Additionally, Huskins talked about the most significant challenges, trends, or changes in IP Law that have impacted his work and how Amazon stays current with these changes. One of the most significant changes he talked about was how courts are treating Rogers post-Jack Daniels. “This was a Supreme Court case a couple of years ago that sort of in a somewhat vague ruling walked back some of the protections that Rogers afforded to certain trademark uses, which a lot of entertainment companies have historically relied on, especially around title use,” he explained. During the wake of Jack Daniels, it was evident that courts were slightly more circumspect about whether Rogers applied to titles and other content uses, and that ambiguity is still playing out in district and appellate court decisions. Huskins stated that this could shift how studios, like Amazon, now look at risk because of Rogers’ application.
Another significant change that Huskins highlighted was the labor negotiations and the issue artificial intelligence presented during these negotiations. Huskins explained that an increasing portion of his practice suddenly became something he had little experience with beforehand.” Speaking on the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and the deals that came out of those strikes, Huskins explained that part of what came out of these deals “was clear consent requirements for talent over the use of digital replicas” This meant making sure there was an understanding of where consent is required, and what constitutes sufficient consent. In addition, studios will have to ensure that talent and production agreements conforming under those include proper disclosure requirements around the use of AI, in order to meet the requirements under the new labor agreements.
Looking ahead at the future of IP law and how it will evolve over the next five to ten years, Huskins talks about how it will be interesting to see how some of the generative artificial intelligence infringement cases will turn out. He speculated that these cases could create new licensing requirements and opportunities, but also could disadvantage certain parties in the production field and advantage others. “It’s often the case that technological innovations are well ahead of the law, and the law is playing catch up, and this can take years to resolve,” Huskins states. He further explains how “we are going to be in a state of limbo trying to navigate where the endpoint is before we know where the law settles.” In terms of how global IP laws will adapt to the increasing digitalization of content and commerce, Huskins highlighted how this for him even was a challenge when he started at Amazon because previously, he only did U.S. litigation, so he needed to understand U.S. litigation. In contrast, Prime Video is now in 240-plus countries. “If we’re delivering a piece of content, that title that needs to be cleared for 240 plus countries” Huskins explained. Ensuring compliance across diverse legal jurisdictions presents a formidable challenge, highlighting the need for a more unified approach to international IP regulations.
Among his proudest accomplishments at Amazon, Huskins spoke on his role in establishing the company’s content protection practice with his manager shortly after joining the team. This project allowed Huskins the responsibility and opportunity to figure out what anti-piracy and content protection looked like for Amazon Studios and be a part of that foundation from the bottom up. Additionally, more recently, as mentioned earlier, Huskins is most proud of participating in the labor negotiations discussions surrounding intellectual property and artificial intelligence and being at the table to advocate for his company.
Lastly, Huskins talked about the importance of having some experience in prosecution and litigation as it builds an excellent foundation for students aspiring to enter the field of IP law. He also mentioned how there are more trademark attorneys than copyright attorneys, so going down the copyright path can make a student stand out in this practice. Additionally, having a solid understanding of artificial intelligence is also super important as it continues to evolve and become an essential part of IP practice.
Note: Some quotes in this interview have been edited for clarity while preserving the original meaning of the statement.