Internet Law

As the adoption of cryptocurrencies — or digital currencies that are encrypted for security — spreads throughout the business and financial sectors, so too do the concerns that lack of regulation render the new-age currency susceptible to fraud, manipulation, and to being used as a vehicle for money laundering. Nevertheless, recent efforts by U.S. enforcement agencies to apply and enforce financial regulations indicate that cryptocurrency-based transactions will be under greater scrutiny than ever before.

The European Commission (EU) is ramping up pressure on tech companies to more aggressively use automated filtering to scrub "illegal" content from the Internet, a move that is drawing criticism from some lawyers and free speech activists in Silicon Valley.

Money is a powerful motivator, but it alone wasn't enough to fuel the ransomware epidemic. After all, the first documented ransomware infection was in 1989, but it remained relatively unknown until its resurgence over the past five years. So what changed? In short, bitcoin.

"There's really no such thing as the cloud, there are only other people's computers." This may have been true at first; but it is now worth some investigation if the present threat environment today demands a secure cloud.

Because there are so many new digital channels for possible intellectual property infringement, knowledge of the various mechanisms available to combat the issue is vital to enabling entertainment industry owners to protect their brand.

This is not the first time that a credit reporting agency has been breached, nor is it the first time that Equifax has reported a breach. What is different with the current breach is its size and the nature of information compromised, as well as the implications of the breach in light of the increasingly complex web of cybersecurity regulations nationwide.

The Debate Continues

Web "scraping" is one method of accumulating data that has sparked recent legal debate, both antitrust and otherwise. Legal challenges to Web scraping have involved privacy claims and claims under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in addition to antitrust claims about the need to collect public data to be able to compete freely.

Even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) can get hacked — and the recently announced cyber attack against the SEC is providing an important wake-up call for U.S. companies regulated by the powerful agency and the attorneys they work with.