Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

When the topic of technology commercialization strategies comes up, the most common options typically mentioned include the sale of a technology or building a business around technology by selling products or providing licenses or subscriptions to technology-based solutions.

Despite global shocks and forecasts of a global recession, economies in the Middle East showed "extraordinarily fast" growth in 2022, according to the World Bank. The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain—all show commitment to further growth and place great value on diversification of their historically oil and gas dominated economies, with digital transformation, artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud-first, and emerging technologies at the core of their strategic development.

The UK communications regulator and concurrent competition authority, Ofcom, announced on April 5 its proposal to refer the UK cloud services market to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for further investigation. This coincided with publication of the interim report of Ofcom’s market study of the largest providers of cloud services (referred to by the authority as “hyperscalers”) in the United Kingdom’s £15 billion ($18.7 billion) cloud services market.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently proposed expanding its Negative Option Rule to all subscription agreements. Businesses offering subscription services would be required to make it at least as easy for consumers to cancel a subscription service as it is to sign up for it. For example, if a consumer can sign up for a service online, then the consumer must also be able to cancel it online in the same number of steps (and not be required to cancel in person).

Until early 2023, a public disagreement regarding open intellectual property licenses was ongoing between the owner of a significant piece of popular content—the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)—and the individuals and corporates that engage with it for free.

On August 19, Russian State Duma member Andrey Kuznetsov introduced a bill on compulsory licensing of copyrights that allows the courts to approve compulsory licenses for content and other copyrightable objects not available in Russia.

In 2021, the Australian Federal Court ruled in a landmark case that a device characterized as an artificial intelligence (AI) machine could for the first time be listed as an inventor on a patent application for the purposes of the Australian Patents Act 1990 (the Act).

Following the success of the previous blog post “A Brief Overview of the Metaverse and the Legal Challenges It Will Present,” we are introducing a new feature for the Tech & Sourcing blog: “Future Watch.” Our Future Watch posts will focus on the most topical areas of the technology industry and will explore the associated legal challenges and potential future developments.

When two parties engage in a merger or acquisition, there are several processes that must take place before the transaction can be completed, including due diligence of the seller’s assets—and particularly the seller’s relevant and material intellectual property (IP).

When two parties come together to discuss a new idea or potential collaboration, the parties are usually operating under the protection of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If the parties decide to work together, they will most likely enter into a services agreement outlining their respective rights and obligations, including intellectual property (IP) ownership and commercialization rights. Occasionally, parties operating solely under an NDA may start collaborating in a way that’s not fully covered by the NDA prior to entering into a services agreement because they’re just not at that stage of the relationship yet. Regardless of whether the parties are ready to enter into such an agreement, if there is any potential for IP to be created in connection with such a collaboration (even if it’s fairly informal), the agreement between the parties needs to address the rights of each party with respect to any such IP.