Posts Tagged: "Data"

To get the case off the ground, the court will decide whether Equifax can be sued in the first place – it’s tricky, because different federal circuits disagree about when this can happen. So, courts in Delaware, Illinois and Washington DC (for example) would allow the plaintiffs to proceed merely because their data is at risk after a hack. This is pretty easy to show. On the other hand though, New York, Conneticut and North Carolina would need to see not just a leak, but that the leaked data has actually been misused afterwards. Equifax HQ is in Atlanta, the 11th circuit. Although those courts have a history of recognising that difficulty (and so supporting data victim lawsuits), it hasn’t yet come down firmly on the question of risk vs misuse.

John Thorne was VP and deputy general counsel for Verizon during its legal battle against former American cable television company Cablevision where Verizon asserted a series of patents it owned… A closer look into the patents renders some interesting information about the patents Verizon asserted and the company’s legal strategy in the case. Two of the eight patents asserted by Verizon in the District of Delaware weren’t originally invented by Verizon, Bell Atlantic or other any other of Verizon’s predecessor companies; they were acquired from outside entities… And haven’t we been told by the likes of Unified Patents that all patent owners who enforce their patents are patent trolls? One would have to assume if Unified is being logically consistent they would have extraordinary problems with Verizon’s activities particularly here where the patents used to sue Cablevision were acquired and not the subject of in-house innovation.

ShadowIT involves workers’ use of unsanctioned products and applications to perform the work of the business enterprise. In other words, ShadowIT occurs when employees use their personal emails and applications, such as a cloud-based storage system, instead of company-approved solutions. According to a recent survey, about one-third of IT use is considered ShadowIT. Whether responding to a subpoena in a wage and hour dispute, attempting to safeguard previous corporate secrets, or analyzing the extent of a data breach, a company’s failure to understand the scope and location of ShadowIT data could be problematic. Companies should have policies in place regarding employees’ (and other workers’) use of unapproved applications, but there should also be an understanding that a policy is not a panacea.

Recently, Windows 10 data tracking has gotten Microsoft into legal troubles with a data regulatory agency that has been engaged with data privacy activism in the past. France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) issued a formal notice to Microsoft informing the company that it has three months to take measures that will make Windows 10 compliant with the French Data Protection Act. CNIL noted multiple ways in which Windows 10 fails to satisfy French data protection law including excessive data collection from apps and the Windows Store, lack of security measures for personal identification numbers (PINs), a lack of user consent for targeted advertising and no option to block cookies. (At this point, it should be pointed out that CNIL’s official website uses cookies, as the screenshot posted here will show readers.)

Days before this Federal Circuit decision, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued its decision for Informatica Corp. v. Protegrity Corp. The patent at issue in this case – U.S. Patent No. 8,402,281 – is directed to a database management system that includes an operative database and an information assets manager database. It is conceivable that the Board erred by pushing past the initial Mayo/Alice question and finding that these claims, which cover a data storage innovation of the kind found in Enfish, may have been erroneous. In other other words, when the Board determined that the combination of the methods did not add significantly more than the already determined abstract idea, that question might have never been properly reached in the first place.

The law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson—or for that matter HAL—or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms… Despite paranoia and hyperbole surrounding AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey, intelligent computers will not take over the world, although that premise does make for exciting science fiction. While the rise of the machines is not something one should fear, AI systems and their architects have made significant strides in realizing learning machines that can adapt to dense, arcane legal terminology.

Is Uber really a technology company? Essentially, Uber runs a car service and at first glance the company is no more a technology company than any other company that happens to have an app, such as your local grocery store. But as you dig deeper you start to see that Uber’s value is not in running a car service, but rather in mining all kinds of data from the devices of those using its service. In fact, Uber’s privacy policy, which governs the information users allow them to collect from their devices, is substantially longer than the document labeled “terms of service.”

We found another pair of patents related to digital worlds, an area where IBM has been active of late. A system for ensuring that the highest number of objects contained within a three-dimensional scene are seen by a person navigating the scene is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8970586. The patent claims a clairvoyance method for a 3D scene by acquiring parameters associated with a clairvoyance camera and a clairvoyance viewport, determining a 3D scene to be rendered according to those parameters, rendering the 3D scene to obtain a 2D image presented in the clairvoyance viewport and composing the 2D image presented in both a clairvoyance viewpoint and a general scene viewport. This system overcomes issues of inconvenient manipulation virtual contentand low efficiency in modifying a 3D scene view to uncover an object.