Cyberattacks are increasing at a startling rate in the business community, not only by hackers for personal intellectual skullduggery, but cyberattacks aimed at obtaining sensitive information. Law firms have become major targets of these illegal attacks, which are aimed at discovering and pilfering the entire subject matter of a commercial operation.
E-commerce counsel would do well to familiarize themselves with the ongoing process of reforms to the EU data protection rules due to their eventual compliance impact and because they constitute more than a simple upgrade to the existing rules.
This edition of the Quarterly State Compliance Review looks at some legislation of interest to corporate lawyers that went into effect between May 1 and July 1, 2014 as well as some recent cases of note.
Big data has taken the world by storm. From its origins as a technical solution for Internet search engines and online retail sales, it has spread across business, science and now government. Big data tools have shown extraordinary power to quickly sort and analyze data, both structured and unstructured. Ultimately, the power of big data resides in its ability to identify signals or patterns in vast data sets.
In Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments, Inc., a unanimous Supreme Court held that the test for patent claim definiteness in 35 U.S.C. '112, '2 (2006) "require[s] that a patent's claims, viewed in light of the specification and prosecution history, inform those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention with reasonable certainty."
In Europe, search engines are classified as "data collectors" rather than news or media outlets, and the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees every person the right to "protection of personal data.
A divided U.S. Supreme Court on June 30 ruled the contraceptive mandate in the federal health care law violated the religious freedom rights of corporate owners who objected to providing the coverage in employee insurance plans.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 4 refused to block same-sex marriages in Oregon pending an appeal of a federal court decision striking down that state's ban.
Although pension plans are thought of primarily as a source of cash income for the elderly, they typically serve other functions as well. For example, they usually contain early retirement features and often provide pensions to workers who lose their jobs because of disability. The high proportion of pension plans with disability retirement features is dramatized in data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual survey -- none of these programs had provisions to make up employee contributions and employer matches where the employee becomes disabled during their employment years.
Online companies in California should ' but are not required to ' clearly explain on their sites how they respond to a browser's do-not-track signals, according to privacy practice guidelines released on May 20 by Attorney General Kamala Harris.
