Equine Cloning: An Investigation of Legality and Prospects
Charlotte Yates Historically, equine breeders strove to produce the best competition horse, by selecting two talented horses to breed. Technological advances, like artificial insemination allowed for horses in different locations to be bred. Now, cloning allows the genetic material of a talented horse to be identically copied in creating one, or multiple offspring Currently, it is unclear what the impact cloning will have on equine sports both legally and athletically. Read Full Text Here
Reform of H-1B Visas
Jamin Xu Originally, H-1B visas were intended to allow United States (hereinafter “U.S.”) employers to address shortages of skilled labor in the workplace by temporarily hiring highly skilled foreign workers only when they are unable to obtain employees with needed skills from the U.S. workforce. In the 1990’s, Congress raised the initial cap of 65,000 H-1B visas a year to 115,000 for fiscal years 1999 to 2000, and to 107,500 for fiscal year 2001 to address a shortage of computer science specialists, but there is now a growing number of U.S. workers who are highly skilled in science, technology, engineering,...
Obama’s Broadband Plan
Ben Agatston This July, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), an administrative office within the Executive Office of the President, published a report that highlighted the “digital divide.” Most notably, the report found that a large number of Americans do not use a computer and “substantial disparities in both Internet use and quality of access.” By exploring Figure 3 of the Council of Economic Adviser’s report, “Mapping the Digital Divide,” it becomes clear that rural areas lag behind more densely populated, urban regions. Read Full Text Here
Telemedicine & the Courts: Teladoc v. Texas Medical Board as a Case Study
Mary Delsener Today, health insurance companies such as Aetna and United Healthcare have partnered with telemedicine companies in order to provide the service for its members. Teladoc, Inc., which markets itself as the first and largest telehealth provider in the United States, is one such company. Of all of business generated by Teladoc’s 11.5 million members, one quarter comes from Texas. Over the course of the past year, however, Teladoc’s ability to continue its services in the state has been on legally tenuous ground due to repeated steps taken by the Texas Medical Board to oust the company from its...
Telemedicine’s Opportunities and Risks; A Balancing Act
Robert Park Obstacles that can complicate successful implementation of telemedicine are the legal ramifications. Legal complications can include fraud and abuse, patient confidentiality, and compliance with state requirements. Violation of patient care can result in heavy fines, and in telemedicine, a recent case involving the Texas Medical Board and a Telemedicine company could heat up within the coming months. Because of these obstacles, healthcare organizations face an arduous journey to getting reimbursed for implementing telemedicine. Read Full Text Here
Keep an I on the Sky: E-Discovery Risks Forecasted for Apple’s iCloud
Daniel Carmeli Some things have not changed since the fire of March 14, 1873. The competing interests of clients seeking convenient storage on one side against providers seeking protection from liability on the other continue to pervade the legal landscape. Naturally, some things have changed, such as the items being stored, the nature of the storage facilities, the associated risks, and the rules governing preservation obligations. Physical property has been replaced with electronically stored information (“ESI”) and warehouses now take the form of remote data servers. And in addition to longstanding conventional risks, such as accidental fire, companies now face...
Geographical Indications: Which Way Should ASEAN Go?
Malobika Banerji “Geographical Indications‟ (hereafter GIs) under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (hereafter TRIPS) has been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate across the world in the last decade. The TRIPS is the first multilateral text providing for a comprehensive protection of GIs. It provides for (a) a base-level protection for geographic indications related to all products; (b) an additional protection for wines and spirits; and (c) an extra-additional protection only for wines. The “extra-additional‟ protection accorded to wines has generated significant controversy and discussion. The TRIPS mandates the need to accord protection for each GI for wines...
Avoid the Rainy Day: Survey of U.S. Cloud Computing Caselaw
Fernando M. Pinguelo; Bradford W. Muller Cloud computing, a computer networking model that gives users on-demand access to shared software applications and data storage, is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and individuals. For example, if you use Google’s Gmail for your email and calendaring, or Snapfish for your online photo sharing and storage; or if your business remotely stores data with a third-party server provider like Salesforce, or uses Windows Azure to create and host web applications and services, you are already “floating in a cloud.” To provide guidance to those companies working within a cloud – or those considering...
A Safe Bet? State Control of Internet Gambling
Scott L. Jones Gambling has been a part of American life longer than the Constitution. The first recorded instance of gambling in the English colonies occurred in 1620 with horse races in Virginia. Shortly thereafter came the first instance of government in America addressing the issue of gambling when in 1621 the Plymouth Colony placed restrictions on gambling in that colony. Ever since that time, gambling has been regulated at both the federal and state levels. With the advent of the Internet, gambling regulations that do not anticipate the use of online gambling are quickly becoming outdated. As individual citizens...
File Sharing: A Tool for Innovation, or a Criminal Instrument?
Andrew Eichner The dawn of peer-to-peer networks and the subsequent rise of file sharing over the Internet have proved to be a considerable threat to the revenues of the Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) and the international music community. While early music downloading across peer-to-peer networks on the Internet was largely limited “to college students with access to fast pipes and techno geeks sufficiently driven to search the Net for the latest Phish bootlegs,” the market for illegally downloaded music taken from file sharing websites has expanded to astronomic proportions and continues to do so even at present. The...