Hank's IP Brew — Issue #14

Howdy, y'all.

This week: the body that enforces college athletes' pay rules just won its first real fight — and the result tells you a lot about how the new system actually works. Plus, Matthew McConaughey trademarked "alright, alright, alright." That's not a joke. It's a strategy — and it's one every creator building a recognizable brand should understand.

Let's go.

Back in Issue #11, we covered a dispute in progress: Playfly Sports, Nebraska's multimedia rights partner, had tried to broker NIL deals for 18 Husker football players worth a combined $7.5 million. The College Sports Commission — the body that enforces the House settlement's $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap — blocked the deals, ruling that Playfly was an "associated entity" of Nebraska, which meant the money counted against the cap.

Playfly and the athletes' lawyers pushed back hard. Their argument: multimedia rights companies are independent contractors, not school affiliates. If they were right, it would have opened a significant workaround — schools could route unlimited NIL money through their media partners, outside any cap and without CSC review.

An arbitrator ruled on May 11. Playfly lost.

The arbitrator upheld the CSC's authority and its associated-entity determination. The $7.5 million in deals stays blocked. This is the first major enforcement test of the House settlement framework, and the CSC passed it. The rules have teeth.

What "associated entity" actually means — and why it matters

The CSC's associated-entity standard isn't arbitrary. It looks at the nature of the relationship between a school and a third party: Does the school control or substantially influence the third party's operations? Does the third party have a financial relationship with the school that creates alignment of interests? Would allowing the third party to act independently effectively circumvent the cap?

Playfly had a long-term multimedia rights contract with Nebraska. The arbitrator apparently found that relationship close enough to count. The upshot: not every third party that touches college athletics is truly independent for purposes of the cap. The label doesn't determine the legal category — the substance of the relationship does.

The practical lesson for brands

If you're a brand structuring NIL deals with college athletes — or advising athletes and families — this ruling is essential reading. The question "is this deal subject to CSC review?" is no longer theoretical. Arbitrators are answering it, and "we're not technically the school" is not a sufficient answer.

The deals most likely to face scrutiny are those where the third party has an existing financial relationship with the school, where the school had any role in facilitating the deal, or where the economics look like a backdoor school payment rather than a genuine arm's-length transaction. Structure matters. Paper trails matter. Getting a clean legal opinion before you sign matters.

For athletes and their agents, the Playfly ruling is also a reminder that the House settlement is still being interpreted in real time. The framework is not finished. Athletes who negotiate deals without understanding the current enforcement landscape — and how quickly it's evolving — are taking on risk they may not see coming.

Last year, Matthew McConaughey received eight trademark registrations from the USPTO. One of them covers the sound mark "Alright, alright, alright." Another covers video clips of his likeness. Speaking at a University of Texas event, he told the audience: "Own yourself — voice, likeness, et cetera. Trademark it, whatever you gotta do."

This is not a vanity project. It's a legal strategy — and a smart one, timed to a specific threat.

Taylor Swift followed with three trademark filings of her own last month. Other celebrities are moving in the same direction. The common thread isn't ego. It's AI.

Why trademark, and why now

Copyright law protects original creative works — songs, films, books. It does not protect a person's name, their speaking voice, their characteristic phrases, or the persona they've spent a career building. Those things live in a legal gray zone that AI exploits effectively: a convincing McConaughey impression or a synthetic Taylor Swift vocal is probably not a copyright infringement, because copyright doesn't protect vocal style or cadence. It might violate right-of-publicity laws, depending on the state — but publicity rights vary wildly, and enforcement is slow and expensive.

Trademark is different. A registered trademark protects distinctive commercial identifiers — signs, symbols, sounds, and phrases that consumers associate with a specific source. If "Alright, alright, alright" is registered as McConaughey's trademark for entertainment services, using it in a way that creates consumer confusion — say, an AI-generated video that implies his endorsement — becomes a trademark infringement. That's a federal claim, available immediately, with established enforcement mechanisms.

The celebrity strategy is essentially this: if you've built a brand around recognizable elements of your identity, register those elements before someone else can use them to impersonate, mislead, or monetize you without permission.

What this looks like for creators who aren't McConaughey

You don't need eight registrations and a Hollywood career to make this strategy work. You need to identify what makes you commercially recognizable and start building a trademark portfolio around it.

For most creators, that starts with your name or stage name — the thing people search for, subscribe to, and buy from. If you haven't registered it, someone else could. The FKA Twigs situation (Issue #13) is a live example of what happens when you build a decade of goodwill under a name and then face a challenge from someone with a prior registration.

Beyond your name, think about what else identifies you: a signature phrase, a visual style, a show title, a logo. Not everything is registrable — a generic phrase or a purely descriptive term won't clear the USPTO. But distinctive phrases tied to commercial activity often will, and the cost of a registration is small compared to the cost of defending against someone who got there first.

The AI angle

The celebrity filings aren't coincidental timing. The USPTO has been fielding questions about AI-generated content for two years, Congress has held hearings but passed nothing, and the VOICE Act and similar bills remain stalled. While the legislative path grinds along, trademark offers something available today: a registered right, enforceable in federal court, that creates a clear legal basis for action when someone uses your identity commercially without permission.

It won't stop every misuse. But it changes the legal conversation significantly. "You infringed my registered trademark" is a much faster and more powerful starting point than "you violated my publicity rights, maybe, depending on what state this happened in."

McConaughey's advice is good advice. Own yourself. Start with the pieces that are already registrable.

See you next time,

Hank

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