Author Archives: John DiGiacomo

Back in March 2020, Congress enacted the “CARES Act.” See news report here. The CARES Act was designed to ameliorate COVID-related economic hardships for individuals and businesses. One key component of the Act was the Paycheck Protection Plan (“PPP”). The PPP was intended to protect small businesses and their employees by providing loans through the […]

On August 20, 2020, the Department of Justice announced that a criminal complaint was filed against the former Chief Security Officer for Uber Technologies, Inc., related to an alleged concealment of a data breach/hack in 2016. See news report here. The criminal complaint charged the Security Officer with two counts — obstruction of justice and […]

The singer/rapper known as Cardi B has been embroiled over the last three years in a copyright lawsuit involving tattoos. In particular, tattoo artist, Kevin Brophy, claims that the design of his back tattoo was appropriated and used without his permission on a male figure on the cover art of Cardi B’s music compilation called […]

Trade secrets are valuable business assets protected under both federal and state laws. Trade secrets are any sort of information — like a formula, process, business method, spreadsheet, data compilation or list — that has economic value from not being generally known and that is subject to reasonable efforts to keep the information secret. In […]

Under general federal and Constitutional legal principles, federal laws will preempt state and local laws where there is a conflict and where federal power and jurisdiction prevail. The power to make laws with respect to patents and copyrights is specifically granted to the federal government in the US Constitution. See US Const., Art. I, Section […]

Back in 1998, Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to significantly enhance copyright protections and to specifically combat copyright abuse on the internet. See 17 U.S.C. § 512. One often overlooked provision in the DMCA is a prohibition on the removal or alteration of what is termed “copyright management information” or “CMI.” The […]

A California federal court has recently ruled that “piggybacking” on an Amazon product listing — where the piggybacking takes the buyer to a different but similar product —  is actionable trademark infringement. See Lavco Solutions, Inc. v. Biztracker Systems of St. John, LLC, Case No. 2:20-cv-03286-VAP-PLAx (US Dist. C.D. Cal. August 25, 2020). In this […]

Over the last few years, there has been a significant legal trend toward protecting consumer privacy with respect to facial recognition software and other types of biometric identifiers. The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA) protects personal information from being collected, shared and used by private businesses without notice and consent. The definition of “personal information” […]

On August 14, 2020, the final version of the regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) were issued by the California Attorney General (“AG”). See here. The final regulations are intended to flesh out areas of confusion in the statute itself and, also, to aid the AG’s Office in its enforcement efforts. For most […]

A recent trend in cybersquatting cases shows that federal courts are serious about rigorously enforcing the “intent-to-profit” element. “Cybersquatting” is a form of trademark infringement where a person or entity uses a trademarked name as an internet domain name and attempts to profit from that domain name registration by “ransoming” the domain name or by […]