In The News
April 21, 2025 – Billboard’s 2025 Top Music Lawyers Revealed
Christiane Kinney
President, Kinney Law
As an attorney specializing in copyright and intellectual property law, Kinney has spent the last year and a half ensuring “our clients retain control over their works, as well as their name, image, unique vocal features and likeness, building in strong contractual protections against the use of AI and fighting back against deepfakes and other technological abuses.” Although Kinney declines to reveal her firm’s client list, she says that handling “music catalog sales, termination of transfer rights and negotiating deals and partnerships with companies and brands who have a forward-thinking mindset that values artists” are among her recent achievements.
April 1, 2024 – Billboard’s 2024 Top Music Lawyers Revealed
Christiane Kinney
President, Kinney Law
Throughout the past year, Kinney has focused her expertise on catalog sales, touring agreements, endorsement deals and termination of transfer rights for legacy artists and their respective estates. She has assisted clients in navigating new media and technology deals and addressing their concerns with AI. Kinney also advised Grammy-winning acts during negotiations over publishing and label deals (including Julien Baker of boygenius for the group’s debut album). “Finding a balance where artists can be fairly compensated for their contributions while supporting the rise of new technology will continue to be one of the most pressing issues facing the music business,” she says.
If I quit law, I would: “Beg to play keys on tour with my clients.”
February 21, 2024 – British Cinematographer: Collateral Damage / Post-Strike Impact
Christiane Kinney, entertainment attorney at Kinney Law, P.C. says some within the actors’ union, like stunt performers and riggers, felt overlooked and dissatisfied with the final outcome.
“AI was obviously a major area of concern that many people felt was inadequately addressed in the final agreement,” she explains. “The exceptions to consent for certain post-production alterations, editing, dubbing, and use of a double, as well as the vague promise for the producers to ‘bargain’ and ‘obtain consent’ for the use of synthetic performers, leaves a lot of performers vulnerable to being replaced by digital replicas.”
November 27, 2023 – British Cinematographer: (Art)ificial intelligence: a new force in filmmaking?
That said, AI is gaining traction in movie-making – just ask Christiane Kinney, entertainment attorney at Kinney Law, P.C. who knows of people using bot ChatGPT as a “launching off” point for story creation, typing in prompts for story ideas. However, this approach comes with a legal warning.
“Generative AI is derivative of all that has come before it – although all art arguably is – but if it is being generated from unclean/unlicensed data sets and someone is arguing fair use, they’re already on the wrong side of the issue,” she says. “They’re arguing a defence to copyright infringement.”
June 1, 2023 – Chambers USA Legal Guide 2023
Ranked in Band 2 for California Media & Entertainment: Transactional: Mainly Talent
April 20, 2023 – Los Angeles Business Journal’s Women of Influence: Attorneys
CHRISTIANE KINNEY
CEO and Founder
Kinney Law, PC
Christiane Kinney is a recognized leader in the music space. She primarily represents artists and producers, assisting her clients in negotiating label and publishing deals, selling music catalogues, creating partnerships for future royalty streams, and helping legacy artists terminate transfer rights and restore ownership over their compositions and master recordings.
Additionally, Kinney has been on the forefront of innovation, handling complex legal issues pertaining to projects within the metaverse and NFT space, and helping strike a balance for her clients and tech companies, and a win-win approach when it comes to these often competing interests. She is also a community leader in many respects. She mentors law students from Pepperdine and Loyola Law Schools, and is a mock trial coach for Mater Dei High School, and she co-founded a 501c3 non-profit organization that provides music and art programs to kids free-of-charge in underprivileged and underserved communities.
April 3, 2023 – Billboard Top Music Lawyers Revealed
Christiane Kinney
President/attorney, Kinney Law
In the past year, Kinney was involved in a project with Blind Burners, a group of visually impaired artists and performers. Through her client Big Rock Creative, a virtual world was created in the metaverse, designed for Blind Burners and other similarly impaired virtual reality users. Next, Kinney is looking to protect her artists against the “fascinating but dangerous” rise of AI-generated artwork. “There will be a surge of copyright infringement claims filed in the not-so-distant future,” she says, “in which many legal theories and issues will be tested.”
April 18, 2022 – Los Angeles Business Journal’s Women of Influence: Attorneys
Christiane Kinney
President
Kinney Law, P.C.
Christiane Kinney is a successful music attorney in Los Angeles. However, the thing that really makes her stand out among others in her field is her resilience and creativity. When in-person events were being canceled left and right at the start of the pandemic, many panicked. Kinney’s creativity has kept her clients busy and making money. Kinney was able to shift her focus toward helping clients find ways to instill community and creativity inside of virtual reality experiences, bringing tech and artistry together to allow artists to continue performing live, engage with fans, and offer thought-provoking, creative music videos while remaining socially responsible.
Kinney helped build the legal infrastructure for BRCvr, an official virtual Burning Man Experience. She also became a certified NFT expert through Blockchain Counsel, and has continued to create opportunities for her clients to flourish in the wake of new technologies.
March 28, 2022 – Billboard Top Music Lawyers Revealed
Christiane Kinney
Entertainment attorney/president, Kinney Law
For its artist clients, Kinney’s firm manages traditional negotiations involving label and publishing deals, terminating transfer rights, catalog sales and partnerships such as future royalty streams. But the work that sets it apart in the music space, she says, is expertise in the burgeoning technology sector, from interactive and virtual reality media experiences and the metaverse to helping on intellectual property due diligence on assets that clients want to mint for NFTs, “which is far more complex in the music space than other areas of intellectual property. There has been so much exciting new ground broken in recent years, largely in response to the pandemic, and we love to help our clients stay on the cutting edge and benefit from these opportunities.”
March 18, 2022 –Article in Rolling Stone Magazine
Christiane was recently quoted in this Rolling Stone article to speculate on the legal reasons why HBO may have remade the cover of an INXS album for the popular show “Euphoria”
There are many reasons a film studio or production company may not get a license to album artwork. As Christiane Kinney, a music industry attorney whose expertise is in copyright law, notes, the individual members of INXS (or the estate of Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997) may not have granted their approval to use their name and likeness in the show. That could be for purely financial reasons or more personal or artistic ones.
December 15, 2021 – Cited as authority in Amicus Curiae Brief to SCOTUS
Christiane was recently cited as authority in a Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLC as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner in the case of Markham Concepts, Inc. v. Hasbro, Inc., et al., Case No. 21-711.