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Internet & Social Media Law Blog

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Delaware 101: Why Is Everyone Incorporating There?

Whether you started thinking about incorporating earlier this morning or you’re a serial founder about to launch your fifth unicorn, the Delaware incorporation might seem like an odd phenomenon. We often hear “Why do so many companies incorporate in Delaware?” and “I’m a proud Californian—I’ve never even heard of Rehoboth…

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Section 230 and Keeping the Trolls at Bay: Twitter Obtains a Significant Legal Victory on Content Control

A California state appellate court sided with Twitter and put a halt to a lawsuit filed against the social media service by white nationalist Jared Taylor. In the lawsuit, Taylor alleges he was wrongly banned from Twitter in December 2017 when Twitter permanently suspended Taylor and his publication, American Renaissance,…

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News of Note for the Internet-Minded – 8/22/18 – AI, Algorithms and the Virtual People of Walmart?

The IoT is a criminal cryptojacker’s delight; new patents suggest Walmart may have an eye on virtual reality in its future; MIT Technology Review has a few technologies worth thinking about in 2018; and more … MIT Technology Review gathers its annual list of 10 potential breakthrough technologies for 2018.…

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Black Boxes, Bad Data and Being Wary of AI in the Boardroom

In his recent commentary, AI: Black boxes and the boardroom, colleague Tim Wright examines how well-founded concerns over the inscrutability of artificial intelligence processes and the bad outcomes that can be triggered by bad data can be alleviated by certain common sense approaches in the boardroom. RELATED POSTS https://www.internetandtechnologylaw.com/2016/08/algorithms-perception-bias.html https://www.internetandtechnologylaw.com/2018/01/artificial-intelligence-patent.html…

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Can a Reporter’s Twitter Account Be a Newspaper’s Trade Secret?

Does one person’s Twitter account a trade secret make? A newspaper in Virginia apparently thinks so. This past week, the owner of The Roanoke Times sued former Virgina Tech sports reporter Andy Bitter under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, among other things, because he refused to give up the…

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The Tesla Tweet that Triggered a Billion-Dollar Gain (and, Possibly, an SEC Investigation)

Last Tuesday afternoon, Elon Musk tweeted from his personal handle, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” These words drove Tesla’s share prices up by 10% on Tuesday before Nasdaq halted trading, increasing Musk’s estimated net worth by $1.4 billion dollars. Since then, there has been a lot…

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Homeland Insecurity: Citing Insufficient Safeguards, the EU Moves to Suspend the Privacy Shield Protocol

The European Parliament adopted a resolution earlier this month to suspend the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement. The Privacy Shield is a protocol that provides for the exchange of personal data between the EU and the United States for commercial purposes. Adopted in 2016 after the European Court of Justice invalidated…

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Livestream Bait and Twitch: Are You Part of Someone Else’s Reality Show?

Every day, millions of people are being unwittingly recorded by others. Every person you see walking down the street likely has a means to record your image and transmit it to billions of people at a whim. But, would you have ever expected that your Lyft or Uber ride was…

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Yabba Dabba Doo We Know Who Owns This? – New Frontiers in Derivative Work Creation

From the frontiers of content creation, we bring news in the longstanding war between man and machine. Or, in this particular case, animators versus software. Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Washington are developing artificial intelligence software, dubbed “Composition, Retrieval…

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Crafting Blockchain Patent Claims to Avoid Enforcement Pitfalls and Maximize Potential Damages

As we approach 2020, distributed ledger technologies (DLT) appear likely to have a far-reaching, comprehensive impact on our global economy. But core components of that economy—intellectual property rights in particular—sit in tension with DLT. Copyright owners learned this lesson with the advent of BitTorrent. Patent owners will face similar threats…