A Visit to Grammys

With Competition Victory, UB Law Student Gets the
L.A. Experience

Kimberly Sweet '09 (left) before the Grammys

As if Kimberly Sweet, a third-year UB Law student, didn't have enough to do over her Christmas break, she wrote a heavily researched, 13-page scholarly paper for a national entertainment law competition.

How'd that work out for you, Kim?

Very well indeed. Sweet was named one of four runners-up in the competition, run by the Grammy Foundation and the American Bar Association's Forum on Entertainment & Sports Law. For her efforts she received a $1,500 scholarship – and even more interesting, a trip to Los Angeles, where she and the other winners hobnobbed with entertainment industry types at a series of events, culminating in a star-studded night at the Grammy Awards ceremony. An out-of-the-ordinary experience, to say the least, for someone studying law and economics in a dual degree program.

It all started when Sweet saw a listing on an ABA Web site looking for papers in entertainment law. "I was looking for something I didn't have a lot of background in,"she says. She looked over a list of suggested topics and did some preliminary research, then talked it over with her father, who has an economics background. She then addressed herself to the topic of how licensing fees for musical works are managed in the European Union.

As Sweet explains it, there has not been a unified mechanism for managing the fees that users (such as stores and clubs) pay for music. Each country had its own "distribution society," and a network of more than 200 contracts among them came into play when, for example, a dress shop in the Netherlands wanted to hear a French singer's ballad as background music. "It was unworkable," Sweet says, especially when a stakeholder like iTunes entered the picture.

The European Commission, executive branch of the European Union, tried to solve the problem by delegating all the licensing authority to distribution societies in the United Kingdom and Germany. In her paper, Sweet argued that these "super collection societies are going to cater to the interests of mainstream artists" at the expense of smaller, independent and folk musicians. In effect, she said that the free-market system is not the ideal solution when dealing with the artistic diversity that exists particularly in Europe. Instead, she proposed a system comparable to NFL Properties in the United States, which negotiates licensing rights to a vast array of merchandise while allowing individual football teams to keep the proceeds of sales associated with their team logos. The paper was due Jan. 2. Three weeks later came the call: She was a winner.

What followed was an early-February adventure in winter-rainy Los Angeles, where the five winners stayed at the Biltmore and presented their papers at a special luncheon. Other highlights: Tickets to the MusiCares Person of the Year Dinner, at which singer Neil Diamond was the honoree. "There was a big silent auction, "Sweet reports." We got to walk around and look at things we couldn't even afford to bid on, "including Diamond's 1957 Thunderbird, a Lexus, spa packages, and all sorts of signed guitars and other memorabilia.

Tickets to the pre-telecast Grammy special awards presentation, where the prizes for technical achievement and life achievement awards are given out.

The Grammy Awards ceremony itself; they were seated near where the presenters and winners walked offstage, so they were up close with the famous.

And the Grammy after-party at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with a Cirque du Soleil-type atmosphere including circus performers scattered around the party space. So dish,Kim … what famous people did you see?

A partial list: Boyz II Men. Blair Underwood from Sex and the City. Paris Hilton. Barry Bonds. Full House actor John Stamos. The singer Pink. And not to be forgotten, "I talked to a lot of interesting attorneys," Sweet says."I collected a great number of business cards."