The Cyberspace Law Committee gathers annually at its Law Institute & Winter Working Meeting on the Law of Cyberspace to showcase the latest cyberlaw developments, this year on January 20 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco (registration available here). For almost 20 years, the committee has been working to analyze legal issues affected by the implementation of emerging technologies and to facilitate the creation of legal infrastructures that protect and support commerce in the digital world. To highlight the committee's cutting edge work, this mini-theme looks at recent proposed legislation, regulation, regulatory guidance, and caselaw, both within the Untied States and globally, that could dramatically affect the way business is conducted online and in connection with online communications.
First, Professor Jon Garon offers a discussion of two of the most wide-reaching efforts to regulate the Internet to have been introduced in Congress in recent years, in his report on the latest legislative salvos in the content creators--content distributors wars, the recent Pro-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. Next, Hank Judy and David Satola consider some of the pressures on a fully free and open global network from some of the non-U.S. sources pushing for more international Internet regulation and control in their piece, Business Interests Under Attack in Cyberspace: Is International Regulation the Right Response? Next, Sarah Jane Hughes and Roland Trope provide a picture of some of the potentially damaging unintended consequences of the SEC's recently-issued guidance concerning corporate data security practices, in their timely essay Avoiding Unintended Consequences Under the SEC Staff's 'Cybersecurity Disclosure' Guidance. Finally, Kathy Porter considers how employers can incorporate employee use of mobile communications devices into their employee electronic communications or Internet-usage policies, along with an updated analysis of how some courts have treated employer efforts to access data stored or created on employee devices, in Going Mobile: Are Your Company's Electronic Communications Policies Ready to Travel? Each of these pieces illustrates how lawyers, regulators, courts, and employers react to cyberspace developments in ways that can have far-reaching, likely unintended, consequences.
Join the Cyberspace Law Committee's Winter Working Meeting on January 20, 2012, at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco, for five hours of CLE on a variety of current cyber law topics, and plan to stay for open roundtable discussions, breakouts to participate in ongoing committee research and writing projects, and keynotes from special guests from the technology law trenches later on January 20 and 21. The committee's Winter Working Meeting is not to be missed!