Regulation

This year may mark the beginning of a new, more predictable era in the world of FCPA compliance and enforcement. Here's why.

The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposed amendment to the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012 (H.R. 3309) that would have allowed the FCC to prevent employers from asking for social networking passwords from prospective employees.

Advances in Internet technology have increased facilitators' capacity to ameliorate Internet bad acts automatically. Failure to employ such technology may result in more liability for Internet facilitators for preventing bad acts online.

As employment disputes commonly involve communications between or among employees, management and customers, it should come as no surprise that social media's role in workplace disputes has drastically increased in the last year. This article discusses recent social media cases and makes recommendations for what employers can do to better protect confidential information and trade secrets.

It is clear that there is no immunity under the Communications Decency Act of 1996 for copyright, patent and trademark law. What remains an open question ' and the subject of conflicting judicial interpretations ' is whether state intellectual property claims such as appropriation of rights of publicity are barred.

In 2009, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California startled copyright owners in ruling that, to comply with the "good faith" requirement the DMCA, content proprietors must conduct a fair-use copyright analysis of unlicensed online uses of their works prior to sending a takedown notice. Now a federal magistrate for the U.S. District Court for the District Montana has adopted the Lenz fair use rule.

The law is, no question, significant ' even record-setting ' patent legislation. For proponents, the new law holds the promise of accomplishing two things, each of which is potentially profound, and each of which applies not only to traditional markets, but to e-commerce as well.

This article examines the retaliation protections provided by Dodd-Frank and how employment lawyers might deal with their impact.