Gartner has published what it considers to be the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019 that will have a significant and disruptive impact on technology and industry through to 2023, characterizing the trends by reference to the “intelligent digital mesh”.
Intelligent
No list of top trends would be complete without some discussion of AI. The first three trends identified by Gartner fall into this category:
Customers in outsourcing arrangements are coming to expect (or starting to demand) that their providers have the resources, technology, and know-how to leverage automation software—whether robotics desktop automation (RDA) or robotics process automation (RPA) software—to enhance the capabilities and efficiencies of IT and business processes. While the software promises big benefits, such as higher levels of accuracy, scalability, and cost-savings, as with the implementation of any new technology, there are new challenges to consider.
In this post we take a look at the top five issues to consider when contemplating the use of automation software in your outsourcing transaction.
When polling fellow tech lawyers about blockchain, most of them seemed to be waiting out getting up to speed on the technology to see if the hype would stick and whether clients would actually implement blockchain solutions at an enterprise level. Would blockchain for business applications, such as supply chain and data transfer, explode like the “cloud” and “automation” or fall by the wayside as other technologies outpaced it?
While the staying power of public cryptocurrency platforms is still in question, the use of blockchain technology to enable business solutions seems to be increasing, with blockchain use cases moving from the innovation lab into implementation.
Reece Hirsch, Morgan Lewis partner and editor of the Bloomberg Law California Domestic Privacy Profile, is hosting a webinar, California Privacy Law Update: The California Consumer Privacy Act and More, during which he will review some of the latest developments in California privacy legislation.
California has long taken an innovative approach to privacy legislation and there were many developments in the state in 2018 and going into 2019. Webinar topics will include the following:
The webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 13, from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm ET.
Does your website or application collect user data? Does your company sell that user data to other third parties, such as advertisers? Does your company disclose this practice to your users in a privacy policy or terms or use? If you answered yes to these questions, you are most certainly not alone. But is your disclosure sufficient? That is the question a new challenge is poised to answer.
In most transactions involving the sale or license of intellectual property, a buyer or licensee will request that a seller or licensor represent and warrant that such intellectual property does not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of a third party. This representation and warranty is often heavily negotiated in a license or purchase agreement because the seller or licensor wants to limit its obligations for breach of this representation to limit its liability under the agreement, whereas the buyer or licensee wants to keep this provision as broad as possible to ensure that it receives appropriate protection from third-party claims for the intellectual property it licenses or buys.
As we previously discussed, nobody is safe from cybersecurity threats, and as our colleagues last reported, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has heightened its cybersecurity scrutiny, issuing an investigative report on cyber fraud against publicly traded companies and signaling it will pursue both bad actors as well as companies failing to implement controls to detect and prevent hacking. A victim of a data breach itself, the SEC is now demonstrating how it intends to pursue bad actors.
On January 15, the SEC filed a civil suit in US District Court in the District of New Jersey related to its own hacking against individuals and business entities in Ukraine, Hong Kong, California, Belize, Russia, and Korea. The SEC alleges in the suit that the defendants hacked into the agency’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system through a variety of means—including phishing emails and malware—and stole information (namely, publicly-traded companies’ earnings information). The suit further alleges the defendants then traded securities based on the stolen information before it became public. The SEC argues all defendants were necessary participants in the “fraudulent scheme” as some defendants were required to “obtain, through deception, material nonpublic information from the SEC’s EDGAR system” and others were required to “monetize the material nonpublic information by making profitable trades.” The SEC requests the district court to permanently enjoin the defendants from engaging in unlawful conduct[1], order the return of all profits and/or gains realized from the trading, and impose civil penalties[2] on the defendants.
The Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act was signed into law on October 11, 2018. The act has been termed a music industry peace treaty of sorts, as it is designed to address years of issues and compromise between music streaming technology companies, such as Spotify, and artists and record labels. The act had unanimously passed the US House of Representatives and Senate earlier in 2018.
In today’s connected world, companies rely heavily on their websites and mobile applications to reach consumers. There have been a number of lawsuits filed alleging companies’ websites and mobile applications are inaccessible to the visually impaired in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).[1] As we last discussed, a federal court found Winn-Dixie had violated Title III of the ADA.
Every January, electronics manufacturers descend upon Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to showcase their latest and greatest forays in devices. Not surprisingly, there was no shortage of shiny fresh connected devices with new and evolving applications in everything from workouts and personal care to the more usual suspects of television and virtual assistants. With Internet of Things (IoT) becoming more ubiquitous, it was only a matter of time before legislation followed. On September 28, 2018, California enacted the United States’ first IoT law, set to go into effect January 1, 2020, just in time for next year’s CES.
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