Eric A. Prager

Adjunct Professor of Law

Venable LLP Rockefeller Center
1270 Avenue of the Americas
The Twenty-Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-503-9813
Fax: 212-307-5598
[email protected]

Eric A. Prager focuses his practice on counseling, licensing and litigation concerning all types of intellectual property rights, with a particular focus on digital content issues.

Mr. Prager has litigated dozens of copyright, patent, and trademark cases. For example, he obtained a copyright judgment of more than $3 million in a case involving unauthorized digital copies of his client's photographic images, after getting an ex parte seizure of the infringer's computer servers using U.S. Marshals. As co-counsel with a barrister and solicitors in the U.K., he represented a Lloyd's of London syndicate before the London Court of International Arbitration in a false advertising action that stopped misuse of the venerable Lloyd's trademark and resulted in a large monetary payment to the syndicate.

On the transactional side of his practice, Mr. Prager worked on the re-launch of Napster as a legal subscription music service, helping the company to identify and negotiate the many agreements it needed to operate the service. He has recently worked on a number of "whole company" securitization deals in which companies pledge income streams from IP licenses as collateral to back securities; one publicly announced deal was a $1.6 billion securitization for Dunkin Donuts.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, has engaged Mr. Prager to assist in drafting several "digital agenda" copyright treaties. Since 1996, he has worked in Europe on five treaties and protocols including the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which was enacted in the U.S. as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Mr. Prager has served on the Intellectual Property Constituency of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and participated in developing the uniform dispute resolution policy that ICANN's domain name registrars are required to apply in connection with domain name trademark disputes. He has also served on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Public Advisory Committee for Trademark Affairs, which advises the PTO on the concerns of trademark owners and the practicing bar.

Mr. Prager is frequently quoted on intellectual property issues in publications from Wired online to Washington Law & Politics, and he gives occasional television commentary on CNBC and MSNBC. One of Mr. Prager's articles on trademark dilution has been cited by two U.S. Courts of Appeals and was cited by the Government in its briefing to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Victoria's Secret case.

Publications

Mr. Prager is the author of dozens of articles and lectures on a variety of subjects in intellectual property law. He is the co-chair of an annual two-day PLI conference entitled “Handling IP Issues in Business Transactions.” He is also the co-chair of an annual two-day LSI conference entitled "Standards Bodies & Patent Pools."

Education

Fordham University School of Law, JD, 1993
Columbia College, AB, 1990

Mailing Address