Posts Tagged: "Data"

As the way we live and work has increasingly moved into virtual environments (I like to call it a legal metaverse), the boundaries between physical, digital, and biological worlds become blurrier by the day. Sensors lie within devices installed across every aspect of our home, office and mobile environments, connected from the edge of each of your devices to networks that are both local and cloud-based (with many in a foggy place between the two). The ensuing data traffic requires massive computing power for transfer, storage, analysis, and response. The migration to automated cloud computing power has further accelerated the deployment of containers across the public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems for the transfer, storage, analysis, and response layers. Kubernetes and Docker have emerged as ubiquitous technologies to build, deploy and manage containerized applications using automation, and investors have noticed. Understanding the key legal issues will enable more successful client relationships for both vendors and customers, and inevitably growth and value creation.

A patent portfolio can be one of the greatest assets that a company owns. A patent portfolio may boost a company’s valuation for a stock offering or a sale, may be licensed for recurring revenue, may be sold to raise cash, or may be enforced to seek monetary damages or to exclude competitors from the market. However, growing a patent portfolio can be expensive. For this reason, many companies hire a portfolio manager to balance the value and expense of growing and maintaining the patent portfolio. A portfolio manager may be responsible for making decisions including a total target number of patent filings, target numbers of patent filings for different technology areas of the company, patent firms to use for filing and prosecuting patent applications, or how to manage costs per issued patent. The portfolio manager can improve the decision-making process by using data-driven decision making. This article shows some examples of data-driven decision making.

The European Commission is seeking feedback on its new strategy for data and has also launched a public consultation on a White Paper on Artificial Intelligence. Both measures were announced yesterday (February 19) by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager; and Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton.

On Monday, December 3rd, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in Carl M. Burnett v. Panasonic Corporation, declining to take up the case on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This is now the latest case involving questions of patent-eligibility for an invention under 35 U.S.C. § 101 declined by the nation’s highest court. In this case, however, the Supreme Court hasn’t addressed the patentability of the relevant subject matter, namely electronic data and electromagnetic analog and digital signals, since 1853.

The GDPR’s entry into force has forced HR teams across the US and EU to re-evaluate the ways in which they justify the use of personal data relating to their employees, applicants and contractors. Whilst compliance priorities will vary between businesses, all US headquartered organizations with a presence or personnel in the UK should be particularly mindful of their enhanced obligations to satisfy multiple conditions under both the GDPR and the UK’s new Data Protection Act 2018 (“DPA 2018”) before collecting certain special categories of personal data.

It has been a long time coming, but the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is almost here. This new privacy regulation requires substantial changes to the collection and storage of data and will affect multiple disciplines, including the brand protection industry. One of the ‘victims’ of the new law is the WHOIS database. How will these changes affect its records?

Computers, processors, memories and transmission equipment are devices or machines. All these machines, as configured systems, have a documented history of addressing concrete technical problems that were difficult to overcome.  Ultimately, computing machines are characterized by what they do, or by their architecture. This article illustrates some of the historical issues in developing programmed and programmable machines.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit entered a non-precedential decision in Art+Com Innovation Pool GmbH v. Google LLC, which affirmed a lower court’s invalidation of a patent covering methods of displaying geographic information to a user. The patent, issued in 2013 to Berlin-based Art+Com Innovationpool and claiming a priority date of December 1995, had been asserted in a patent case decided in the District of Delaware in which the German-based patent owner was seeking more than $100 million from Google for infringement committed by its Google Earth service.

To get the case off the ground, the court will decide whether Equifax can be sued in the first place – it’s tricky, because different federal circuits disagree about when this can happen. So, courts in Delaware, Illinois and Washington DC (for example) would allow the plaintiffs to proceed merely because their data is at risk after a hack. This is pretty easy to show. On the other hand though, New York, Conneticut and North Carolina would need to see not just a leak, but that the leaked data has actually been misused afterwards. Equifax HQ is in Atlanta, the 11th circuit. Although those courts have a history of recognising that difficulty (and so supporting data victim lawsuits), it hasn’t yet come down firmly on the question of risk vs misuse.

John Thorne was VP and deputy general counsel for Verizon during its legal battle against former American cable television company Cablevision where Verizon asserted a series of patents it owned… A closer look into the patents renders some interesting information about the patents Verizon asserted and the company’s legal strategy in the case. Two of the eight patents asserted by Verizon in the District of Delaware weren’t originally invented by Verizon, Bell Atlantic or other any other of Verizon’s predecessor companies; they were acquired from outside entities… And haven’t we been told by the likes of Unified Patents that all patent owners who enforce their patents are patent trolls? One would have to assume if Unified is being logically consistent they would have extraordinary problems with Verizon’s activities particularly here where the patents used to sue Cablevision were acquired and not the subject of in-house innovation.

ShadowIT involves workers’ use of unsanctioned products and applications to perform the work of the business enterprise. In other words, ShadowIT occurs when employees use their personal emails and applications, such as a cloud-based storage system, instead of company-approved solutions. According to a recent survey, about one-third of IT use is considered ShadowIT. Whether responding to a subpoena in a wage and hour dispute, attempting to safeguard previous corporate secrets, or analyzing the extent of a data breach, a company’s failure to understand the scope and location of ShadowIT data could be problematic. Companies should have policies in place regarding employees’ (and other workers’) use of unapproved applications, but there should also be an understanding that a policy is not a panacea.

Recently, Windows 10 data tracking has gotten Microsoft into legal troubles with a data regulatory agency that has been engaged with data privacy activism in the past. France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) issued a formal notice to Microsoft informing the company that it has three months to take measures that will make Windows 10 compliant with the French Data Protection Act. CNIL noted multiple ways in which Windows 10 fails to satisfy French data protection law including excessive data collection from apps and the Windows Store, lack of security measures for personal identification numbers (PINs), a lack of user consent for targeted advertising and no option to block cookies. (At this point, it should be pointed out that CNIL’s official website uses cookies, as the screenshot posted here will show readers.)

Days before this Federal Circuit decision, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued its decision for Informatica Corp. v. Protegrity Corp. The patent at issue in this case – U.S. Patent No. 8,402,281 – is directed to a database management system that includes an operative database and an information assets manager database. It is conceivable that the Board erred by pushing past the initial Mayo/Alice question and finding that these claims, which cover a data storage innovation of the kind found in Enfish, may have been erroneous. In other other words, when the Board determined that the combination of the methods did not add significantly more than the already determined abstract idea, that question might have never been properly reached in the first place.

The law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson—or for that matter HAL—or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms… Despite paranoia and hyperbole surrounding AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey, intelligent computers will not take over the world, although that premise does make for exciting science fiction. While the rise of the machines is not something one should fear, AI systems and their architects have made significant strides in realizing learning machines that can adapt to dense, arcane legal terminology.