Privacy Law
This term refers to any information that can identify a natural person, whether directly or indirectly.
What is Personal Data? [or What's Personal Identifiable Information/PII?]
This type of patent protects functional inventions like machines, processes, and compositions of matter, and lasts for 20 years.
What is a utility patent?
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was established in 1914 to protect consumers and promote this.
What is fair competition?
The primary goal of trademark law is to protect brand identity and prevent this from happening to consumers.
What is consumer confusion?
Copyright does not protect ideas, but it does protect this aspect of them.
What is the expression of the ideas?
This U.S. law protects the personal health information (PHI) of individuals and requires consent for most disclosures, except in cases like research, crime investigations, and public interest.
What is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)?
To be patentable, an invention must meet three key requirements: It must be useful, novel, and this.
What is non-obvious?
The FTC’s Click-to-Cancel Rule, taking effect in 2025, ensures that subscription services make cancellation as easy as this.
What is signing up?
Unlike patents and copyrights, trade secrets can last indefinitely, but they must meet three key requirements: secrecy, competitive advantage, and this.
What is reasonable protection (efforts to maintain secrecy)?
This DMCA provision protects online platforms from liability for copyright infringement if they remove infringing content when notified, have a policy to terminate repeat infringers, and do not profit directly from infringement.
What is DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision?
Individuals have the right to access, correct, delete, and even transfer their data. What is this right to transfer data to another service provider called?
What is the Right to Data Portability?
There are three types of patents: Utility and Plant patents last for 20 years, but this type of patent, which protects ornamental designs, lasts only 15 years.
What is a design patent?
According to the USPTO’s 2024 guidelines, AI-assisted inventions can be patented only if a human inventor contributes this level of creative input.
What is “significant contribution”?
In the U.S., non-compete agreements are completely banned in this state, which prioritizes employee mobility.
What is California?
After receiving a DMCA takedown notice, a platform must remove the content. If the alleged infringer believes the removal was a mistake, they can file this.
What is a DMCA counter-notice?
This law, passed in 2020, amended and expanded the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) by adding new consumer rights and establishing a dedicated privacy enforcement agency.
What is the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)?
In cases of willful patent infringement, courts may award this type of enhanced monetary damages, which can be up to three times the actual damages.
What are treble damages?
In December 2023, the FTC imposed a 5-year ban on Rite Aid for its unfair use of AI, including false identifications and lack of safeguards. This enforcement was based on Section 5 of the FTC that aims to prevent these two business practices
What is "Deceptive & Unfair Practices"?
The trademark distinctiveness spectrum includes fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, and generic categories. This type of trademark requires secondary meaning, must be registered on the Supplemental Register at the USPTO, and has conditional protection.
What is a descriptive trademark?
To qualify for copyright protection, a work must meet these two key requirements.
What are originality and fixation?
GDPR violations can result in two tiers of fines. What is the maximum fine for the most serious violations, such as breaches of data protection principles or unlawful processing?
What is €20 million or 4% of global annual revenue, whichever is higher?
Under U.S. patent law, abstract ideas are not patentable unless they pass a two-part test. The first step asks whether the claim is directed to an abstract idea. The second step determines whether the claim does this, making it patent-eligible.
What is "adds something more"?
California’s AI Transparency Act (SB 942) requires AI platforms with over 1 million monthly users to provide tools for detecting AI-generated images, video, and audio. These tools must use these two types of watermarks.
What are manifest (visible) and latent (hidden) watermarks?
In PepsiCo v. Redmond (1995), a former employee was blocked from working at a competitor based on this legal doctrine, which assumes a person will inevitably disclose trade secrets in a new role.
What is the inevitable disclosure doctrine?
The four-factor test determines whether a use qualifies as fair use. One factor considers whether the use is transformative (purpose and character of use) and how much of the work was copied (amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole). Name one other factor in the fair use test.
What is the nature of the copyrighted work or the effect on the market?