Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

As part of our Spotlight series, Dion Bregman (who wears many hats at Morgan Lewis, such as deputy leader of the firm’s intellectual property practice, leader of the firm’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) team, managing partner of the firm's Silicon Valley office, and co-leader of the firm’s technology industry team) shares some of his meta thoughts. As a follow up to Dion’s recent participation in a panel discussion, An Introduction to the Metaverse, Dion provides insight into some important developments, issues, and opportunities, as we all continue to focus on Keeping Up with the Metaverse. 

A new Morgan Lewis White Paper, Bipartisan Proposal Attempts to Provide Solutions for Comprehensive Regulation of Digital Assets, analyzes the proposed Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA) in the United States from several different angles, including with respect to issues such as key definitions in this emerging space, jurisdiction, ancillary assets (which are not fully decentralized), stablecoin issuance, taxes, disclosures, and money transmission. 

As we discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, many SaaS providers are seizing opportunities to expand their offerings and become a go-to marketplace or network, but their original contract terms and procedures often don’t fit their evolving business models.

In October 2021, it was announced that Facebook would formally change its name to Meta as part of an ambitious new initiative called the “metaverse”—a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Shortly after this announcement, we wrote a blog post, A Brief Overview of the Metaverse and the Legal Challenges It Will Present. Since then, metaverse trends have experienced phenomenal growth, with the emergence of new immersive virtual reality and collaborative spaces for human interactions, transactions, and data exchanges on decentralized networks.

As more and more SaaS providers, in digital health, fintech, and other industries, look for ways to integrate with and offer third-party applications (in their quest for powerful network effects), they eventually reach a point where the reality contemplated by their original standard terms and the world (or metaverse) of their now-envisioned business model diverge.

On May 6, 2022, the UK government outlined its plans to boost competition and drive economic growth and innovation in a major regulatory reform aimed at big tech. The news comes in the wake of fears that a handful of tech giants disproportionately dominate the market, subjecting smaller businesses to predatory prices and ultimately harming consumers through higher prices as well as limited options and control over their online experiences.

Welcome to the conclusion of our two-part Spotlight post with Lee Harding in which we discuss key employment/labor and employment law issues in relation to UK and EU outsourcing transactions. In Part 1, we talked about key initial considerations and specific timescales involved.

In this two-part edition of our Spotlight series, we welcome Lee Harding to discuss key labor and employment law issues in relation to outsourcing transactions, predominantly in the United Kingdom and European Union.

In this webinar, partner Mike Pierides and associate Oliver Bell will review developments in the legal and regulatory landscape around the world relating to the development and deployment of artificial intelligence.

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).