Adam C. Belsky

specializes in intellectual property, antitrust, general business litigation, media law, and class actions. He has extensive experience handling copyright, trademark and trade secret litigation, complex commercial litigation, defamation, invasion of privacy, employment discrimination, and other constitutional and civil rights cases.  He has an active practice representing foreign countries in litigation in the United States, including on behalf of Cuba, South Africa, and Bolivia.  He also has substantial appellate experience in both federal and state court.

Significant engagements include representation of Quokka Sports, Inc. and the America’s Cup in a successful action to regain the americascup.com domain name; Ariba in an international commercial arbitration resulting in a $26 million award; a leading video game company in a copyright infringement suit against a competitor for copying a popular video game; a large construction company whose former employees misappropriated trade secrets in forming a competing firm; Chronicle Books in numerous commercial matters; and a major computer manufacturer in a landmark international arbitration of copyright and antitrust claims. Mr. Belsky’s antitrust experience includes a number of class action cases involving technology-related industries, including cases against Microsoft, Intel, and DRAM, SRAM, LCD and CRT manufacturers. Additionally, Mr. Belsky has litigated extensively in the area of consumer fraud, including successful class actions against Pacific Bell for fraudulent advertising of voicemail and Old Republic Title Company for fraudulent escrow practices.  Mr. Belsky has obtained favorable settlements in a privacy action against television stations for improperly disclosing the identities of children who had been victims of sexual abuse and on behalf of listeners of the Pacifica radio network in an action to restore local community control of the stations

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Mr. Belsky is active in pro bono work, representing the “found-sound” artists Negativland in a contractual and intellectual property dispute with their record company, obtaining a successful settlement in which Negativland regained the rights to a number of their recordings. He has represented a class of migrant farmworkers in California who were charged excessive rents at state-run farmworker housing centers, negotiating a settlement entitling the farmworkers to a 100% refund of the overcharge plus interest.  He has also represented Muslim prison inmates in a successful appeal of their civil rights action for discrimination and violation of their free exercise of religion.

Mr. Belsky received his A.B. degree from Amherst College in 1984, and his law degree from Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, where he was Note and Comment editor on the California Law Review and graduated in the top one percent of his class. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stanley A. Weigel, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, from 1989-90. Mr. Belsky is a member of the California and various federal court bars. He is the co-author of “Implied Waiver Under the FSIA: A Proposed Exception to Immunity for Violations of Peremptory Norms of International Law,” published at 77 Cal. L. Rev. 365 (1989), and frequently cited in court opinions.