New Year’s is always a time for remembrance and nostalgia, with lots of “top” lists. This is another, focused on the most important, entertaining and reverberating technology law cases of 2014.
Top 5 Technology Law Cases of 2014
Yearly Archives: 2014
5 Reasons Sony Pictures Will Be a Cybersecurity Inflection Point
The massive data breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment may well turn out to be a tipping point in the adoption by corporate boards and officers of strong cyber threat prevention, detection and remediation practices.
K-Cups, Innovation and Interoperability
Even before the landmark United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust case, competition law was a bit schizophrenic when it came to the question of interoperability. Monopolists have no general duty to make their products work with those of competitors, but what about the situation where a dominant firm deliberately re-designs products to render them incompatible with others? That […]
Apple’s Cable Set-Top Box and Interoperability
Nearly six months before this week’s reveal of iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was in talks with Comcast Corp. about “teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web.” For content, the […]
No Dodgers, No Merger
The anticompetitive effects of vertical integration by cable systems have now reached crisis proportions with the ongoing refusal — already more than five months old and with no end in sight — of Time Warner to license Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games for cable or satellite distribution, or local broadcast, on any network other than its own SportsNet LA programming channel.
There Go the French Again on Competition
A French decision on Caribbean yogurt muddies the difference between antitrust and consumer protection, which are quite distinct concepts in America.
Legal Disruptions Redux
New legal service technologies are premised on the prediction that significant change in the legal industry will be driven by consumers and small businesses, not by lawyers and law firms. It’s a hard notion with which to disagree.
Music Licensing—La Plus Ça Change?
The same underlying market power and distribution problems still exist in music licensing, just as they did in 1941.
Competition Advocacy Matters—Here’s Why and How
There’s a famous old political adage — “where you stand is where sit” (also known as Miles’ Law) — meaning basically that government policy positions are dictated more by agency imperative and institutional memory than objective consideration of the public interest. A related concept is “regulatory capture,” where administrative agencies over time become defenders of the status quo and pursue objectives more for regulated firms […]
The FTC Weighs In On Tesla’s Travails
Three high-level FTC staffers are backing Tesla in its ongoing fight to sell electric cars directly to consumers.