This page contains articles that we publish related to digital law. For each article there is a brief introduction. The entire article can be accessed by clicking on the link. All articles are available as a PDF. Please feel free to provide feedback, commentary and/or suggestions for future articles. Our standard legal disclaimers apply (see our Terms of Use). In short, nothing contained in any article should be considered to be legal advice.
If your online presence is important to you then you already know. The answer to this question obviously depends on what is being audited. At the Digital Business Law Group (DBLG) what we mean by a website audit is a review of your online presence to ensure that it complies with all applicable law U.S. law, and where required, to international law as well. The audit usually encompasses drafting and/or reviewing your privacy policy and terms of service. However, if your site conducts commerce then it is likely we will need to draft/review your advertising, subscription and other similar agreements, depending on your business model. You can think of an audit as an insurance policy; one that reduces the risks of doing business online.
The HIPAA Survival Guide (HSG) is a forest from the trees overview of the HIPAA Privacy and Security rules, and also includes a general overview of the HITECH Act as it pertains to these rules. The genesis of these rules is covered in the Background section of this document. The HSG only targets a subset of covered entities, namely providers. Furthermore, the HSG focuses mostly on small providers, since this group will clearly be the most challenged by new laws and regulations, especially if their baseline understanding of HIPAA is insufficient. An online version of the HSG can be found here.
The words “open source” are now a permanent fixture in the American consciousness. An idea that started in the “geeky fringes” of an emerging technology culture now has significant impact on both Wall Street and Main Street. A significant amount of legal commentary exists regarding the issues surrounding open source software, its licensing model, and its relationship to proprietary software and the intellectual property regime that supports them. There is no denying the market impact that open source software, in all its incarnations, has had over the twenty plus years of its existence, and the reasons that make it ripe for legal review. This article will address these legal issues as background information but focuses on whether the proposed remedies are essentially “solutions in search of a problem.”
This Article will review the history of business method patents (BMPs) and make the argument that, despite all the bad press from the majority of commentators, BMPs meet the same statutory requirements as other patents and their quality is at least as good, if not better. In addition, it will make the argument that BMPs satisfy the constitutional policy requirement of a quid pro quo for the public—potentially contributing to the explosive growth of e-commerce as opposed to impeding it. Finally, it will provide some practical advice for clients either desiring to acquire BMPs or concerned about infringing on them.
All roads lead to Google. Few Internet users would take issue with this statement. The research for this article started there, and its evolution returned to Google again and again. Google started as a Stanford Ph.D. research project, was incorporated as Google, Inc. in 1998, and started selling ads based on search key words in 2000. The word “google” is now recognized as a verb in leading dictionaries, and Google the company is one of the most dominant business organizations on the planet. To say that search is important to the global economy is probably understating its value. On the way to becoming a verb (as in “google it”) “search has moved from a useful service on the edge of most Internet users’ experience to the de facto interface for computing.”