December 2014

Like many federal statutes, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) contains a provision governing how the statute is designed to interact with similar or otherwise related state laws.  When this type of provision is used to override or supplant similar state laws, the provision is called “preemptive.”  On November 11, 2014, the Connecticut Supreme Court held in Byrne v. Avery Center For Obstetrics and Gynecology, P.C. that state law negligence claims are not preempted by HIPAA even where the plaintiff relies on HIPAA to establish the applicable standard of care.  In so holding, the Court

With paywalls and premium subscriptions finding only modest success, paid advertisements remain the primary means of generating revenue from online content. Native advertising has emerged as a leader in the competition for ad impressions and brand engagement. Expected to grow from $7.9 billion in spending this year to $21 billion by 2018, native advertising is lauded as the future of online advertising.

A few months after the European Court of Justice ruled on May 13, 2014 that search engines are considered personal data controllers under the EU Data Protection Directive of 1995 and, as such, should provide data subjects with a right to be forgotten, a French Tribunal enforced this principle in X & Y v. Google France.

In a summary proceeding on September 16, 2014, the Paris Tribunal (Tribunal de Grande Instance) held that Google must erase from its search engine, under penalty of €1,000 per day, all links leading to defamatory content published on Facebook (see attached judgement: TGI Paris – Ordonnance du 16 septembre 2014).

With the new year just around the corner, retailers should make a resolution to learn more about EMV technology.  That’s because 2015 is slated to be the year EMV technology makes significant inroads in the United States, and retailers need to be prepared.  In this post, we answer some frequently asked questions about what the introduction of this new standard means for retailers and the steps they must take in order to prepare for the widespread adoption of this new technology.