The litigation risks around data and privacy management continue to grow. Evolving class-action strategies, statutory damages, and new state laws create even more risks. Ian Ballon identifies a few of the biggest issues that we should be looking for in the next 12 months.

 

SPEAKERS

Ian Ballon, Wayne Stacy

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Expert Series Podcast. I'm your host, Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director of BCLT. And today we're here to talk about what types of legal issues we should be thinking about when it comes to the internet. And today, we have Ian Ballon, from Greenberg, with, as many of you may know, Ian, he is one of the world's leading experts when it comes to internet law. It probably that's not an overstatement, he may be the world's leading expert. He's not the leading expert, at least in the top three or four. But what we know about Ian is that he's got incredibly broad practice. He's the Global Intellectual Property and Technology Practice Group lead at Greenberg, which is an enormous group. But what he brings to us is this breadth of knowledge about what we should be thinking about across internet law as a whole. So no matter what particular area you're in, Ian should have a little bit of input that you need to know today. So Ian with that, I wanted to say thank you for joining us.

 

Ian Ballon  01:06

Well, thank you. Thank you for that very generous introduction. You're very-- You're too kind.

 

Wayne Stacy  01:13

Well, tell your friends because other people that litigated against me for years have never said that about me so well, well, and we get I wanted to kind of showcase this Brett today and run through a grab bag of questions that people should be should be thinking about. So some of these don't necessarily relate to the question before. But let's just just run through a few things. So one of the issues that I've been looking at is the case act and voluntary copyright arbitration arbitration. So, you know, tell us what you think about the impact on that, should we be looking at it, studying it worrying about it?

 

Ian Ballon  01:52

I think it's really important for companies to to prepare for it because it is very much an under the radar issue. Everyone talks about how case act arbitration is voluntary. And so I think a lot of companies really aren't paying much attention. Because if it's voluntary, you can think about it when you need to. But it's only voluntary, if you don't opt out. So this is I think, one of the places where companies are going to run into trouble, which is if you are duly served with a case at complaint, you have 60 days to opt out, otherwise it's going to be binding. And I think it is important for companies to determine whether they want to be involved in case ACC proceedings or don't. There are three types of claims that can be brought one is infringement. One is non infringement, essentially, like declaratory relief, and one is for sanctions for misrepresentation in connection with a notification or counter notification under Section 512 F of the DMCA. So I think we will see a lot of complaints, particularly from individual copyright owners