Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

A new Morgan Lewis White Paper, Bipartisan Proposal Attempts to Provide Solutions for Comprehensive Regulation of Digital Assets, analyzes the proposed Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA) in the United States from several different angles, including with respect to issues such as key definitions in this emerging space, jurisdiction, ancillary assets (which are not fully decentralized), stablecoin issuance, taxes, disclosures, and money transmission. 

As we discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, many SaaS providers are seizing opportunities to expand their offerings and become a go-to marketplace or network, but their original contract terms and procedures often don’t fit their evolving business models.

In October 2021, it was announced that Facebook would formally change its name to Meta as part of an ambitious new initiative called the “metaverse”—a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Shortly after this announcement, we wrote a blog post, A Brief Overview of the Metaverse and the Legal Challenges It Will Present. Since then, metaverse trends have experienced phenomenal growth, with the emergence of new immersive virtual reality and collaborative spaces for human interactions, transactions, and data exchanges on decentralized networks.

As more and more SaaS providers, in digital health, fintech, and other industries, look for ways to integrate with and offer third-party applications (in their quest for powerful network effects), they eventually reach a point where the reality contemplated by their original standard terms and the world (or metaverse) of their now-envisioned business model diverge.

Welcome to the conclusion of our two-part Spotlight post with Lee Harding in which we discuss key employment/labor and employment law issues in relation to UK and EU outsourcing transactions. In Part 1, we talked about key initial considerations and specific timescales involved.

In this two-part edition of our Spotlight series, we welcome Lee Harding to discuss key labor and employment law issues in relation to outsourcing transactions, predominantly in the United Kingdom and European Union.

When two parties come together to discuss a new idea or potential collaboration, the parties are usually operating under the protection of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If the parties decide to work together, they will most likely enter into a services agreement outlining their respective rights and obligations, including intellectual property (IP) ownership and commercialization rights. Occasionally, parties operating solely under an NDA may start collaborating in a way that’s not fully covered by the NDA prior to entering into a services agreement because they’re just not at that stage of the relationship yet. Regardless of whether the parties are ready to enter into such an agreement, if there is any potential for IP to be created in connection with such a collaboration (even if it’s fairly informal), the agreement between the parties needs to address the rights of each party with respect to any such IP.

The Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence recently published its AI Index Report 2022. In a world of near-constant advancement and innovation in technology, it’s no surprise the report found that more global artificial intelligence (AI) legislation was proposed in 2021 than ever before.

The White House issued an executive order on March 9 relating to the responsible development of digital assets in the United States. This executive order outlines the first ever whole-of-government approach to both addressing the risks of digital assets and maximizing the potential benefits.

The Bank of England (Bank) and the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published their final report of discussions from the UK Artificial Intelligence Public-Private Forum on February 17. Over quarterly meetings and several workshops conducted since October 2020, the Bank and the FCA jointly facilitated dialogue between the public sector, the private sector, and academia in order to deepen their collective understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and explore how to support the safe adoption of AI. This initiative was incorporated into the UK National AI Strategy.