Defining Reasonable Care for the Protection of Personal Data
March 01, 2020
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court enlivened the Thanksgiving holidays of privacy lawyers in 2018 with its decision in Dittman v. UPMC, which held that an employer has a legal duty to exercise reasonable care to safeguard employees' personal information. While the scope of the decision technically was confined to the employer-employee relationship, the court's reasoning implies that such a duty of reasonable care may arise in any scenario where one party engages in the collection of personal information.
Exercising the Extraterritorial Limitation on U.S. Copyright Law
March 01, 2020
A necessary element of secondary liability claims is an underlying infringement of U.S. copyright law by a third party. If the activities abroad are not subject to the law, the predicate direct infringement required for the imposition of secondary liability cannot be established.
Biometrics and the Fifth Amendment: A New Frontier
February 01, 2020
When used for work, mobile devices routinely contain employers' proprietary and confidential data. The struggle between Government requests for access to such data and constitutional protections — including the Government's ability to compel the turnover of biometric "keys" to unlock mobile devices — create areas of concern.
The Threat of Ransomware 2.0 for Law Practices
February 01, 2020
During the past few months, there has been a significant paradigm shift in the cybersecurity world. Threat actors from Russia, in particular, have significantly enhanced their capabilities to target individual businesses and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) or IT companies. It is critical that lawyers, their firms and the companies they serve be aware of these threats and take the appropriate measures to proactively secure their own — and their clients' — sensitive and private information.
Challenges to Evidence of Copyright Ownership
January 01, 2020
There has been a long-term debate over whether sound recordings can be copyright works made for hire. Sound recordings don't appear in the list of works for hire set out in §101 of the Copyright Act of 1976, though record labels argue recordings can be deemed so as a "compilation" or a "contribution to a collective work," per §101.
A Look Behind, A Look Ahead: Part 1 - Cybersecurity
January 01, 2020
Cybersecurity Law & Strategy partnered with our ALM sibling Legaltech News to ask cybersecurity and e-discovery experts what they thought the key trends were in 2019 and what they expect to see in 2020.
