Many companies are increasingly looking to the federal government during COVID-19 for liquidity or other financial assistance. Colleague Drew Schulte recently spoke with host Joel Simon on Pillsbury’s Industry Insights podcast and highlighted a variety of strategies available to companies with intellectual property assets (and particularly patents or patentable assets) to reduce costs and to generate revenue by monetizing their IP assets.
Have you ever been startled by the buzzing sound of a passing swarm of angry mechanical bees as you work from home? Have you ever looked out your window and noticed an agile device zipping through your property? If so, drones might be aversely affecting your lifestyle. These little devices once only lived in the imaginations of science fiction writers, but nowadays, they are popular gadgets that many parents routinely buy for their kids during Christmas. The popularity of drones has exploded due to cheaper production costs, advancements in camera and wireless technologies, and the appeal of high-quality bird’s-eye view footage popularized by aspiring vloggers looking to create impressive visual content. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has further fueled drone popularity due to their potential in the context of robotic delivery services. However, despite its advantages, drone technology poses a significant threat to property and privacy rights; luckily, the law offers several grounds to obtain legal remedies if such rights are infringed.
Recently, Pillsbury’s Deborah Thoren-Peden sat down with a panel of experts that included Millicent Calinog Tracey (former Wells Fargo SVP), Samantha Ettus (founder and CEO of Park Place Payments) and Pillsbury partner John Barton. They discussed how businesses and the customer experience have been impacted due to COVID-19 and how banks, fintechs and payment companies can maximize opportunities and mitigate risk with increased demand in the digital payments space.
Anyone who has spent time scouring the internet for free-to-use content has likely come across pictures, written materials and music permissively licensed under one or more of the Creative Commons licenses. These licenses tend to offer the public a broad range of options when using copyrighted material that is released under the Creative Commons scheme. However, like all licenses, the Creative Commons licenses can contain conditions and requirements that the licensee must adhere to in order to avoid liability. Two recent appellate court decisions shed light on one important condition in the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license.
Simple Agreements for Future Tokens (SAFT) continue to pose difficult and controversial legal questions under U.S. securities, commodities and tax laws. In “Legal Implications of Secondary SAFT Sales,” Daniel N. Budofsky, Laura E. Watts, Riaz A. Karamali and James T. Chudy explore these questions at length.
Though the USPTO typically examines trademark applications in the order received, special circumstances can from time to time justify examination out of order. The USPTO has determined that the COVID-19 pandemic is such a special circumstance, recognizing the need to bring COVID-19-related medical products and services to market as quickly as possible.
In this time of social distancing, working from home and school closures, people and businesses are relying on the internet more than ever to engage with friends, family, clients, consumers and the public at large. Social media and content-sharing websites are providing individual communities and the entire nation with 24/7 accessibility to forums for public discourse, communication and the dissemination of news.
As the world continues to deal with the unprecedented challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have emerged as a potentially formidable tool in detecting and predicting outbreaks. In fact, by some measures the technology has proven to be a step ahead of humans in tracking the spread of COVID-19 infections. In December 2019, it was a website-leveraging AI technology that provided one of the key early warnings of an unknown form of pneumonia spreading in Wuhan, China. Soon after, information sharing among medical professionals followed as experts tried to understand the extent of the unfolding public health crisis. While humans eventually acted on these warnings, the early detection enabled through use of AI-supported data aggregation demonstrates both the promise and potential concerns associated with these systems.
On the newest episode of Industry Insights podcast, host Joel Simon and Daniel Budofsky discussed digital securities and virtual currencies.
Joel Simon: While the world has been busy battling COVID-19, it has been making startling progress in an area that has held a lot of promise but was struggling at times to gain traction—digital securities and virtual currencies. What just a couple of years ago seemed like a Wild West of scams and frauds has quickly been evolving into a mature, efficient alternative of capital raising and trading, that has been embraced by traditional financial institutions and governments alike. With me today to chat about these developments is a leader of our Fintech practice and head of our Derivatives and Structured Products group, Daniel Budofsky.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect industries worldwide, companies are working to stay abreast of—and to proactively react to—the effects and the unique risks of this pandemic. The inherent uncertainty concerning timeframe and magnitude of market disruptions has caused many companies, and even industries, to reevaluate status quo operations and adjust both short-term plans and long-term risk assessments. In light of this, the Division of Corporation Finance of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently released guidance for public companies regarding its current views on such companies’ risk factor disclosures in light of COVID-19’s distinctive disruptions.
