Category: Internet Law

Website accessibility for the visually impaired has been one of the thornier legal issues that has arisen over the last decade or so. This is because the federal Americans With Disabilities Act (“ADA”) requires that all places of “public accommodation” be accessible to those with disabilities. However, it was a debatable legal question about whether […]

The City of Portland, Oregon, just banned the use of facial recognition technology by private businesses and individuals. See Popular Mechanics news report here. Portland previously banned use of facial recognition by law enforcement and city agencies. However, now all private entities are prohibited from using facial recognition software and technology anywhere in the City […]

Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed Assembly Bill (“AB”) 713 which amends the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”). See text of AB 713 here. The CCPA has now been amended at least eight times and businesses should expect continued changes in the coming years. AB 713 makes several amendments to the CCPA the most important of […]

Capital One, N.A., and Capital One Bank (USA), N.A. (“Capital One”) were recently fined $80 million for a 2019 data breach and data security failures that contributed to the data breach. See Reuters report here. The result is in line with many governmental investigations and fines that have been imposed for cybersecurity failures over 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 […]

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 […]

In yet another example of the importance of encrypting mobile devices and laptops, a small Rhode Island healthcare system called Lifespan ACE has agreed to pay $1.04 million to the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) to settle an investigation resulting from an unencrypted MacBook laptop computer that was stolen in 2017. The OCR is a […]