It seems like there is a nonstop stream of interesting developments these days with respect to advertising and marketing law, but only once in our careers has a colleague been in a movie, so we wanted to take a break from “adlaw” news to share our excitement.
Our partner and former senior FTC official Daniel Kaufman plays himself in “MoviePass, Movie Crash,” which premiered yesterday on Max. The movie chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of MoviePass. During its less-than-two-year existence, MoviePass attracted the attention of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection which brought a complaint alleging that the company blocked subscribers from using the service as advertised and failed to secure personal data. The complaint is particularly notorious in that it marked the first time a majority of the Commission alleged that any deceptive claim about a product or service subject to a recurring subscription violates ROSCA even if the deception is unrelated to the subscription. During much of the pendency of the matter, Daniel was acting director of the Consumer Protection Bureau, and thus a movie career was born.
So if you have an Max subscription, we recommend you check the movie out. And if you don’t, well Season Two of “House of the Dragon” premieres June 9, so now may be a good time to sign up. And one quick piece of FTC movie trivia: Daniel is the second former FTC attorney we know of who has been in a movie. Who was the first one? We’ll give you a clue – “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”