FTC Social Media Endorsement Guidelines: The Effects on Social Media Users and Business Owners
Jason Kim In the midst of heydays of social media, a social media user will inevitably face a product or service endorsement post in his/her social media feed or thread page. However, in the endorsement post, it is quite rare to see disclosure information as to whether the social media endorser has some kind of commercial relationship with the product manufacturer or service provider. On September 7, 2017 the FTC issued its first ever legal action against individual social media endorsers for posting endorsement posts without revealing their commercial relationship with the service providing company. This action by the FTC...
Interoperability’s Role in Striving for Precision Medicine
Martha Koroshetz President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in his 2015 State of the Union address, a research effort to find treatments that are tailored to specific genetic profiles and characteristics. This personalized and context-specific treatment approach will require big data analysis of patient outcomes and their genetic sequence, which must then be accessible and comprehensible to caregivers. The initiative must therefore be able to reconcile genetic data, demographic information, and health information, in the electronic health record. To achieve data interoperability, the organizations engaged in the initiative must confront questions of data privacy, standardize data exchange, and incentivize...
ISP Regulation and Antitrust: The Case for Better Competition
David Yangli Wang This Note firstly discusses net neutrality and ISP regulations broadly– do we see it as a commerce issue, a government regulation issue, a data fairness issue, or even a human rights issue? And if we decide that ISPs must be regulated, what type of antitrust regulation will be most effective? This Note takes a comparative look at Internet regulations around the world, examining both the development of broadband infrastructures and the antitrust laws (or lack thereof) of such countries. This Note ultimately concludes that the current antitrust regime in the United States will not be able to...
Massachusetts Non-Competition Laws: Protecting Trade Secrets or Restricting Commonwealth Innovation?
Gabriella Falcone Non-competition agreements are subject to much debate in the realm of American trade secret law, and this debate is magnified when taken in the context of employment in major technology hubs across the United States. The overwhelming success of Silicon Valley, California technology firms, where non-competition agreements are generally unenforceable, has sparked conversation over whether enforceability in other states is impeding innovation in other major technology hubs. The Massachusetts legislature is attempting to address this issue with two major bills on the enforceability of non-competition agreements in the Commonwealth, which as Massachusetts’ presence in the technology industry continues...
Who’s Fault Is It Anyway? The Modern State of 3D Printing Copyright Liability
Marx Calderon When new technology arises, lawmakers struggle to keep up: how do I perform the balancing act of managing risk through regulation without stymying innovation. An ongoing struggle is the 3D printer and its copyright liability. 3D printers take a complicated manufacturing process and puts in our homes instead of a factory. The ease in which a person can create an object at home is an incredible feat, but it comes with consequences. Specifically, owners of copyrighted images are weary of their products being reproduced at home and sold in a secondary market. This article briefly describes the source...
Antitrust Issues in Reverse Payment Settlements: Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. et al., a Case Study
Amanda Creedon In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint alleging that reverse settlement payments were unfair restraints of trade and therefore violated federal antitrust laws. The Supreme Court held that reverse payment settlements in patent infringement litigation are not presumptively unlawful but can sometimes violate antitrust laws, to be determined on a case-by-case basis. The settlements are not immune from antitrust attack even if the agreement’s anticompetitive effects fell within the scope of the exclusionary potential of the patent. Read Full Text Here
The Growing Concern Regarding US Corporate Trade Secrets
Stephen Anderson Globalization has produced many benefits for United States corporations, but a significant detraction has been the emergence of trade secret theft. As technology advances, trade secret theft has become an even more persistent threat in the general marketplace. There are various ways trade secret theft can occur, but it is increasingly common for the theft to involve cyberspace, especially as these corporations expand into foreign markets. Consequently, Congress has taken a significant interest in curbing trade secret theft, as is evidenced by the various proposals before them today. These proposals offer varying solutions to trade secret theft, which...
Data Exclusivity for Biologic Drugs: The TPP’s Potential Poison Pill?
Tina Cheung On October 5, 2015, after many years of secretive negotiations, the US government with 11 other countries across the Asia Pacific and Latin America reached an agreement on the largest free-trade deal in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Addressing everything from wildlife conservation and tax reductions for agriculture, to the free flow of information on the Internet and intellectual-property rights for movies and pharmaceutical drugs, this far-reaching agreement has the potential to impact up to one-third of world trade. One of the most contentious parts of the agreement involves intellectual property rights of pharma companies to data exclusivity...
Awarding Enhanced Damages in Patent Infringement Cases
Michael Thomas This term the Supreme Court will take up the issue of awarding enhanced damages in patent infringement cases. Two separate cases petitioned the court to take up the issue after defendants were spared enhanced damages following some questionable activity. The current test used in awarding enhanced damages is a two-part test implemented by the Federal Circuit that incorporates an objective and subjective component. Read Full Text Here
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