News Items Topics Internet Law Update

US and UK Sign Treaty for Sharing Personal Data from Suspects' Online Accounts

The United States and the United Kingdom have entered into the world’s first-ever CLOUD Act Agreement that will allow American and British law enforcement agencies, with appropriate authorization, to demand electronic data regarding serious crime, including terrorism, child sexual abuse, and cybercrime, directly from technology companies based in the other country, rather requesting the information through the other country’s governmental ...

U.S. Federal Gov't Proposes Oversight of Foreign Investments in Companies Handling Sensitive Data

The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued proposed regulations that would comprehensively implement the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) which was signed into law last year. 

FIRRMA empowers the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to examine and permit or ban foreign investment transactions that give the foreign investor certain powers at the target ...

Courts in the EU Can Order Facebook to Remove Defamatory Content Globally and Monitor Republication

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has held that the EU eCommerce Directive does not preclude courts in member states of the EU from ordering Facebook to remove defamatory content on a worldwide basis rather than just within the platform’s instances in the EU. The decision was delivered in a lawsuit brought by an Austrian politician who ...

Final Amendments to the California Consumer Privacy Act Before it Becomes Effective

The California legislative Assembly and Senate both approved several amendments to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) set to take effect on January 1, 2020, and become enforceable on July 1, 2020.

First, the CCPA was amended to exclude from its application a business’s handling of information about its employees, managers, directors, job applicants and freelancers. It also exempts information ...

Ninth Circuit Affirms Preliminary Injunction Against LinkedIn's Blocking of Data Scraping by a Start Up

The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s preliminary injunction in favor of a startup company, enjoining LinkedIn from blocking or putting in place any mechanism (whether legal or technical) with the effect of blocking or preventing the startup from accessing, scraping or using LinkedIn users’ public profiles. 

The decision was delivered in a ...

October GDPR Updates: Judgment and Penalty on Cookies, Proposed ePrivacy Regulations and More

CJEU holds cookie consent must be active and explicit.  The Court of Justice of the European Union (the “CJEU”) issued a decision in a case discussing companies’ use of cookies under the European General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”) and the ePrivacy Directive. The CJEU held that a pre-ticked statement of users’ consent to cookies does not qualify as ...

September GDPR Updates: Judgments on Google's Search Engine, New Code of Conduct and More

Right-to-be-forgotten is limited to the EU. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment in Google’s appeal against the CNIL – the French Data Protection Authority – about the territorial boundaries of the ‘right-to-be-forgotten’. The CNIL imposed a penalty of €100,000 on Google for its refusal to remove objectionable search results from the localized ...

U.S. Copyright Office Sides With Led Zeppelin in Copyright Infringement Dispute over ‘Stairway to Heaven’

Randy Wolfe asserted a copyright infringement lawsuit in California federal court alleging that Led Zeppelin’s 70s hit ‘Stairway to Heaven’ infringes his song ‘Taurus’ by copying a passage from it. The lawsuit was originally dismissed by a jury verdict finding that although Led Zeppelin had access to Taurus, the two songs were not sufficiently similar to constitute infringement. The jury ...

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