Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

The Biden administration issued a long-anticipated executive order on August 9 regarding US outbound investment in select technology and products with national security applications produced by “countries of concern.” Executive Order 14105 (EO) was released in conjunction with a corresponding Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) from the US Department of the Treasury (Treasury). Both these developments, while not yet effective, are critical to technology companies and investors, and the coming months will reveal the extent of the impact and the direction Treasury takes with its proposed regulations.

Financial regulators in the United Kingdom, European Union, and United States are proposing new rules to regulate how financial products are promoted on social media platforms. There is a particular focus on financial influencers, who are individuals or groups with large followings on social media that promote financial products or services, also known as "finfluencers.” Regulators are taking action against finfluencers promoting what they deem to be high-risk financial products, including cryptoassets, after a series of cases where financial products promoted online led to huge losses for consumers.

Morgan Lewis is hosting our annual Tech & Sourcing Summit in New York on Wednesday, October 25. The summit will include a full day of sessions starting in the morning with breakfast, followed by a networking lunch.

Morgan Lewis partner Greg Parks recently authored an Insight regarding developments in US data privacy law and increased attention on data privacy and security by the US Congress and certain federal agencies.

Morgan Lewis’s technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions team often advises on transactions where there is some form of intellectual property being transferred from one party to another party. This may be due to a corporate transaction, a cooperation or joint venture arrangement, or some other form of commercial agreement.

While the regulatory landscape around artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, navigating contractual arrangements and apportioning risk for the use of AI may seem like stepping into the unknown. In this blog post, we consider how a few familiar concepts within commercial contracts may be applied to the provision and use of AI tools as part of services.

The first half of 2023 was one of the most active six months for legislative and regulatory developments around artificial intelligence (AI). Our colleagues recently noted the European Parliament’s adoption of a draft AI Act as well as the significant activity in the United States related to regulating AI, both at the federal and state level. AI is also increasingly giving rise to data privacy concerns.

The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) became effective on July 10, and on the same day, the European Commission adopted an Adequacy Decision relating to the DPF, as a successor of the EU-US Privacy Shield. While only those companies subject to the jurisdiction of either the Federal Trade Commission or the US Department of Transportation are eligible to self-certify their compliance with the DPF, the scope of eligibility is likely to broaden in the future.

We recently wrote about the emerging trend of content moderation outsourcing. In this blog post, we turn our attention to another growing trend: legal process outsourcing.

Open-source software (OSS) representations and warranties are an integral part of the intellectual property (IP) representations and warranties in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions and financings, as M&A transaction documents regularly include requests for a seller to represent and warrant that it has policies in place regarding the use of OSS, has provided such policies to the acquirer or investor, and has not deviated from such policies. These representations and warranties are important, but they are routinely and necessarily backstopped by the due diligence process.