| Biography:
Chuck Sims joined Proskauer Rose LLP in 1986. Educated at Amherst College and Yale Law School, he came to the Firm after a clerkship with the Honorable Raymond J. Pettine, of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, and nine years’ service as national staff counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. At the ACLU, Chuck litigated First Amendment and national security cases and oversaw the ACLU’s Supreme Court docket. He argued two cases in the Supreme Court, and appeals in the Second Circuit and District of Columbia Circuit.
Since joining Proskauer, Chuck has concentrated on copyright, First Amendment, defamation law, and complex federal appellate and trial matters. Chambers & Partners’ America’s Leading Business Lawyers calls him “one of the foremost IP media lawyers, particularly for his knowledge of copyright issues,” and described him as “that rare lawyer who has strengths both in theoretical and practical understanding” and as having a “strong talent for oral arguments.”
After serving as trial counsel, he argued the Second Circuit appeal for the motion picture studios in their groundbreaking and successful litigation, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, against hackers who were publicly providing illegal software for decrypting DVDs; and represented Lexis-Nexis in its victory against an Internet start-up which had attempted to steal the entire Lexis database for uploading onto the Web. He represents Reed Elsevier’s Lexis-Nexis division, and has served as chief counsel in the lower court, the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court for the defense group of databases and newspaper and magazine publishers in a consolidated national class action brought by freelance writers seeking damages for inclusion of their articles in electronic databases, a case which was settled after complex mediation. He has worked on numerous other copyright matters, for clients such as the Association of American Publishers (representing eight leading publishers of trade, professional, and educational books in a groundbreaking and successful suit against a national copyshop chain, gaining one of the largest statutory damage awards then ever awarded and an injunction against further unconsented anthologizing of the publishers’ copyrighted works), Houghton Mifflin, and England’s Royal Court Theatre.
In the First Amendment field, Chuck has represented The New York Times and The Discovery Channel in class action litigation testing the right to engage in newsgathering, and recently defeated on interlocutory appeal a lower court’s class certification order. He has litigated challenges to content-based federal restrictions of cable television programming, which the Supreme Court largely invalidated in Denver Area Educational Television Consortium v. FCC; and handled (with Ron Rauchberg) a facial First Amendment challenge to New York’s Son of Sam law for Simon & Schuster, which the Supreme Court unanimously invalidated. In addition to counseling leading cultural institutions in New York City on First Amendment issues, he has handled major libel actions (for clients including Prudential Equities Group, the Philadelphia Eagles, Multimedia Entertainment, Phil Donahue, NBC, and UPS), with none decided adversely. For many years Chuck organized Proskauer’s pro bono activities. Last year he successfully obtained an order quashing an unprecedented subpoena seeking copies of “any and all” copies of a classified document that had been leaked to the ACLU.
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