Source: https://faithatlaw.com/blog/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 05:25:57+00:00

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I recently wrote an article for the Maryland Bar Journal (Nov/Dec 2014 edition) entitled Virtuality: The Lawyer that is Almost Really There, and I recently made a presentation on the same topic to the SL Bar Association. Please find a link here to the recording of the presentation.
Fundamentally, technology has significantly impacted the practice of law. Part of that impact has been felt in the greater access to information that previously was only available in proprietary database systems. Part of that impact has also been felt in more cost effective methods to acquire new clients and provide more access to the legal system through fixed cost or unbundled legal services that may be provided electronically. However, not all aspects of these changes have been welcomed by the legal marketplace with open arms. For one, our ethics rules have not embraced the changes driven by technology to the delivery of legal services, leaving the practicing lawyer with uncertainty about the ethics status of newer technologies available to support the practice of law. In addition, there are substantial questions about the security and integrity of some of the technology available to lawyers to support virtual practices. There is one constant: change, and one consistent struggle for all of us: trying to keep up with it.
So, what happens to all your digital stuff when you die, anyway? Of course, if you are dead, chances are you won’t much care. But your loved ones might.
Who might be able to access all of those accounts if you were to die?
Does anyone you care about know your password to your computer?
Do you have a list somewhere of accounts that you maintain online?
Are there online accounts you would prefer be kept private, or things you have written you would prefer not become public knowledge, like an online private diary?
If no one has your password, what might your family do if they needed to gain access to those accounts after you die?
ility of a personal representative or family member from having access to online content of a deceased loved one. For example, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which became law in 1986, was intended to prevent the unauthorized use by a person of a “protected computer.” 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Court decisions over time have interpreted the CFAA to subject unauthorized users to civil and criminal sanctions for various forms of unauthorized access to computers or online accounts. The Stored Communications Act (SCA), another federal law, provides a private cause of action for the unauthorized and intentional access of another’s online communications. 18 U.S.C. § 2701. Because these laws have been around before the age of Google and Facebook, many online service providers have established, within their terms of service, limitations on the access by others of a user’s account. There is some concern in the legal community that a person who violates such an online agreement to gain access to a user’s website could be prosecuted under CFAA or SCA.
In addition, some online services may not give you more than a personal license to access an item, such as music. Bruce Willis, of hard-talking and explosion-surviving Die Hard fame, got into an argument with Apple about whether Willis could leave his extensive iTunes collection to his children. B. Griggs, Can Bruce Willis Leave his iTunes Music to his Kids?, http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/03/tech/web/bruce-willis-itunes/ (accessed Aug. 4, 2014). The iTunes license agreement contains a provision that prohibits you from sharing your account information with anyone else. The agreement also limits access to content on iTunes for “only for personal, noncommercial use.” Apple, Inc., iTunes Store Terms and Conditions, http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html (accessed Aug. 4, 2014). If you think about that restriction, after you die, your estate would be unable to transfer your account to an heir to access your iTunes music or movies.
Mark Twain, who lived in a very different technology age, planned that his autobiography would not be published for a 100 years, to reduce the chances that his writing would trigger a libel lawsuit from a living contemporary, or heap an unwanted burden on his surviving family. G. Adams, After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html (accessed Aug. 4, 2014).
You may very well have digital items you would prefer that your heirs not be able to access. That might have been Alison Atkins’ intention when she died prematurely at 16, having finally succumbed to a colon disease. Though upbeat publicly about her health and condition, she also kept a private blog secured by a separate password where she contemplated suicide and other “dark” thoughts. G. Fowler, Life and Death Online: Who Controls a Digital Legacy?, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 5, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324677204578188220364231346.
Without an expression of your intent, your family may have no choice but to break into your computer and gain access to all of your online and social media accounts, risking a violation of federal or state privacy law, and also gaining access to information you might wish to protect them from. Give us a call or get in touch with us if you want to talk more about your digital estate planning.
The question presented to the court was whether Aereo’s conduct, in recording and re-broadcasting over-the-air television broadcasts to individual subscribers to Aereo’s services, constituted copyright infringement. Aereo’s service is a web-based system that permits subscribers to watch broadcast television through a web broadcast. Subscribers are able to access available television programming by selecting a specific live broadcast from a menu on Aereo’s website. The system will then direct an Aereo-controlled antenna to tune in to the program and transcode the broadcast for access by the requesting subscriber. In the process, the Aereo system makes a digital copy of the over-the-air broadcast to permit streaming of the content to the subscriber. The digital copy is only made available to the individual subscriber that requested the particular broadcast. Am. Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc., 573 U.S. ___ (2014).
Case law over time has helped to clarify when a performance is to the “public.” In Columbia Pictures v. Redd Horne, 749 F.2d 154 (3rd Cir. 1984), the defendant operated a video rental and sales business. In addition, patrons of the store could rent one of eighty five private viewing booths, permitting up to four people to view a video in the store in the booth. The plaintiff had alleged that the private viewing booths constituted an unauthorized public performance, in spite of the defendant’s attempt to limit the number of people who could view a tape in the store. The third circuit agreed, finding that the video store was open to the public and that it was the defendant, not the patrons, that performed the copyrighted works in the private viewing booths.
However, as technology has evolved, a separate line of cases has developed in an attempt to shield technological improvements from claims of copyright infringement. Starting with Sony in 1984, the Supreme Court held that the VCR could be sold, even though the people purchasing the technology might use it to record copies of copyrighted materials on television, without permission or a license from the copyright holders. Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). In more recent years the federal courts have sided with the music industry and found infringement with certain file sharing and peer-to-peer sharing technologies, such as Napster, Grokster and Limewire, concluding that these technologies resulted in massive and wholesale infringement.
The Aereo service itself is like a cloud-based VCR, in that the service permits users to request that a particular over-the-air broadcast be recorded and transmitted via the internet to the individual requesting the recording. Aereo also went to great pains to distinguish its service from peer-to-peer sharing services by emphasizing that a user selects a broadcast he wishes to watch via the internet, and Aereo only records and directs that recording to the individual requestor, not making the copy available to any other Aereo user – even one that requests the same broadcast through the service. Unfortunately, Aereo could not prevail on these points before the Court. Instead, the Court found that Aereo’s service was functionally similar to community antenna television systems (“CATV”), and that Congress had specifically amended the Copyright Act to define CATV systems as copyright infringing, overturning legislatively two Supreme Court decisions holding otherwise: Fortnightly Corp. and Teleprompter Corp.
In each of those cases, the defendants operated a system where the defendant would collect over-the-air broadcasts from a region and transmit those broadcasts to subscribers in another broadcast market without the payment of a royalty and without a license from the copyright holders. The Court held that these activities were outside of the scope of the Copyright Act as it stood prior to the 1976 amendments, because the CATV systems were acting more like “viewers” rather than “broadcasters” of the copyrighted content of others. This was so, according to the Court, because the CATV system “‘no more than enhances the viewer’s capacity to receive the broadcaster’s signals [by] provid[ing] a well-located antenna with an efficient connection to the viewer’s television set.’” Aereo, Inc., slip. op. at 6 (quoting from Fortnightly Corp., 392 U.S. at 399). However, Congress disagreed with the conclusion of the Court and ultimately amended the Copyright Act to reach the conduct of CATV system providers, establishing a compulsory royalty regimen under section 111 of the Act.
Ultimately the Court held that Aereo was providing a service similar to the CATV systems, and, in spite of some differences that the dissent argued were significant, held that if the CATV systems were infringing, so to must the Aereo system. However, the Court did not declare that Aereo is, in fact, a cable system, which would permit Aereo to take advantage of the compulsory licensing system established by Congress. In a filing July 9, Aereo has apparently now taken the position that it is a cable system and is seeking a license to operate as such. Time will tell whether Aereo will be able to operate in this manner or whether Aereo will be unable to become a “legitimate” content distributor, like some other technology innovations that had originally been declared infringing.
 Admittedly, the Sony case was about unauthorized copying, rather than public performance of, copyright works, and Sony was in the suit defending against a contributory or vicarious infringement claim, where Aereo was accused of direct infringement by publicly performing copyrighted works without a license.
 See, e.g., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001); Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 715 F. Supp. 2d 481 (S.D.N.Y. 2010); but see Cartoon Network LP, LLLP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., 536 F.3d 121 (2nd Cir. 2008) (cert. denied 557 U.S. 946 (2009)).
 Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc., 392 U.S. 390 (1968).
 Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 415 U.S. 394 (1974).
The case brought by the Author’s Guild against Google, for scanning of millions of books without any author’s permission, ended without a trial when Judge Chin granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of Google at the end of 2013. In his thirty page opinion, Judge Chin agreed that Google’s conduct is affirmatively protected by section 107 of the Copyright Act, which sets out the factors that courts consider when determining if a use of another’s copyrighted work is “fair,” meaning the defendant is not required to obtain a license or pay a royalty for the use.
This controversy started almost ten years earlier when Google began its “Library Project” to scan and index books from a variety of library collections, including Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford and Stanford. Millions of books were to be scanned and indexed using Google’s engineering expertise and search engine, including some books that remain under copyright protection. Google also established a “Partner Program” under which Google worked with publishers and rights holders to index and display books with permission from the owner of the rights in the work. By Judge Chin’s decision last year, more than twenty million books had been scanned and indexed into the Google Books project.
Google’s database of books includes a full digital copy of each book it scans. Each such book is indexed for searching. Users can navigate to books.google.com and search through the index using queries of their own design. In response, the search engine will return a list of books from the index that are relevant to the query. Clicking on a particular book will take the user to a page which displays the cover of the book and a short summary of the content. If the book was scanned through the Partner Program, the user is able to view what the author or publisher has consented to display on the results page. If the book is in the public domain, the user is able to view the entire book and also to download the electronic version of the book. However, for books still under copyright protection but not available from the Partner Program, the search result displays the book in “snippet view.” “Snippet view” is the source of controversy for the plaintiffs in the Author’s Guild because Google did not obtain permission to show portions of the indexed book in search results.
Copyright infringement is the invasion of an exclusive right of an original work by another. Among the exclusive rights of authors are the rights to reproduce, distribute, and publicly display their works. Fair use is an affirmative defense to a claim of copyright infringement. Under section 107, courts consider four factors when determining if a defendant’s infringing use is “fair:” (a) the purpose and character of the defendant’s use, (b) the nature of the plaintiff’s work, (c) the amount and substantiality of the work used by the defendant, and (d) the impact of the use on the plaintiff’s market for his work. Determining whether fair use applies depends on the facts and circumstances of each case. Judge Chin emphasizes in his opinion that “transformative” uses of copyrighted material are more likely to be a fair use. Citing Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, the court defines “transformative” uses of a work as the creation of a new work from an old one, where the new work has a different purpose or character and the fair user alters the original expression resulting in a new work with a new meaning or message.
Fair use has been heavily litigated because the defense turns on the specific facts of each case. In addition, while the Google Books case is an important one, it is not the first case to raise the issue of fair use in the context of technology on the internet. More than ten years ago, the Ninth Circuit confronted a search engine that was sued for copyright infringement by a photographer, Leslie Kelly, whose photographs had ended up indexed into Arriba Soft Corp.’s internet image search engine. In that case, Kelly created, sold and licensed landscape photographs of the American West, which he made available for sale through his website. The defendant, Arriba Soft, had crawled and indexed images available from public internet web sites, including Kelly’s web site. The Ninth Circuit held that Arriba Soft’s use of Kelly’s photographs was transformative. Kelly’s purpose in creating his photographs was aesthetic: people would purchase Kelly’s works to have a framed photograph of a landscape in their home. In contrast, Arriba Soft used Kelly’s photographs to create thumbnails which were placed into a search database so that search users could use keywords to find related images. The thumbnails could not supplant the original aesthetic use of the works because the thumbnails were at a considerably lower resolution. Ultimately, Arriba Soft prevailed on the basis that its use of Kelly’s works was a fair use. Amazon obtained a similar outcome in the case Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir. 2007).
The court held that the second factor – the nature of the plaintiff’s works – also favored a finding of fair use, because most of the books indexed by Google, 93%, were non-fiction, and all of the books had been published before Google indexed them. A court is less likely to find fair use when the defendant has used highly creative works, or works that are not yet published. The court held that on balance, the third factor – the amount and substantiality of the use of the plaintiff’s works by Google – weighed slightly against a finding of fair use because Google had used all of the works verbatim, though that was required for the purpose of Google’s use.
Finally, the court held that the last factor – the impact on the plaintiff’s market for its works – also strongly supported a finding of fair use. In this case, the court found that the plaintiff’s market for its original works would be very unlikely to be supplanted by the “snippet” view that was available through Google’s website in response to user searches for keywords. To the contrary, the court found that Google’s database would most likely enhance the sales of the plaintiff’s works.
As a result, the court found that Google’s use of the plaintiff’s works was a fair use and entered judgment for Google. The Author’s Guild filed notice of its intention to appeal, and subsequently filed an appeals brief with the Second Circuit in April. Google’s reply is due in July. Stay tuned for further developments!
 The Author’s Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 1:05-cv-08136-DC 5 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 14, 2013) (appeal pending in 2d circuit in case number 13-4829 CV).
 A careful reader will note that Google also has a complete digital copy of each book it scans, which Google backs up to backup media and shares with the source library that provided the work to be scanned. Plaintiffs alleged that these acts violate the authors’ exclusive rights of reproduction and distribution.
 The Author’s Guild, Inc. at 16-17.
 Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003).
 The Author’s Guild, Inc. at 19.
Note: this article was originally published in Maryland Physician Magazine in its May/June 2013 issue.
The HiTech Act in 2009 set in motion a series of changes to the HIPAA rules that govern the use, disclosure and protection of protected health information (“PHI”). The Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) subsequently issued interim regulations in response to these changes in the law, and this year issued a final regulation as of March 26, 2013 that requires compliance by covered entities and business associates within 180 days. These final HIPAA security regulations make a number of important changes which may impact your relationship with vendors that provide you with electronic health record (“EHR”) licensing and support.
First, prior to HiTech, business associates of covered entities were not required to comply with the security rules and standards set forth in the HIPAA security regulations. HiTech changed the applicability of the security regulations to include business associates. The final regulation from HHS implements this provision of the HiTech Act, but with a twist: subcontractors to business associates are also defined as business associates within the final regulation. What this means is that EHR vendors and their subcontractors must fully comply with the HIPAA security rules, not just with “reasonable” security measures.
Second, prior to HiTech, there was no federal requirement that a covered entity or business associate report a security breach that resulted in the disclosure of protected health information (“PHI”). HHS subsequently issued interim regulations to implement these notification requirements, and as of March 26, 2013, HHS issued final regulations that alter the assumptions and exceptions to what constitutes a “breach” under HIPAA. In addition, business associates and subcontractors are obligated to report security breaches to covered entities.
For providers that are at the beginning of their search for an EHR vendor, have an attorney review any proposed contract between your organization and the vendor to ensure that the business associate provisions comply with the final regulations. If you already have an existing relationship, work with your attorney to ensure that the contract in place complies with the final regulatory requirements. All business associate agreements must come into compliance with the final regulations by September, 2014.
In recent years, some EHR vendors have moved to “cloud”-based data storage and access solutions for their clients. These cloud systems are designed so that provider data collected by the EHR is stored at a remote data center, and made available over an internet connection with the provider. Some EHR vendors subcontract with a third party to provide the cloud data storage. More likely than not, that subcontractor is now a business associate under the final regulations and takes on the same obligations as the EHR vendor with regards to your data. The final regulations require that a covered entity’s contract with their business associate require subcontractor compliance with the final security regulations.
Beyond compliance issues, providers will want to evaluate whether an EHR vendor that hosts your data in the “cloud” has really made sufficient provisions for security. Such an evaluation makes good business sense because of the incredibly negative consequences of any security breach that results in a loss of PHI for a health care provider. For example, does the vendor comply with a recognized, national security standard (like NIST)? Is the EHR vendor, or the data center it uses for storing your data, audited against a SAS standard like SAS-70? What are the security practices and security devices in place at the EHR vendor to protect your data? If the vendor will host your data, what are its disaster recovery and data backup procedures? Are those procedures regularly tested?
Providers and their counsel should also evaluate what, if any, additional provisions should be negotiated into any final agreement with the EHR vendor concerning the vendor’s compliance with a security standard, commitment to security procedures, and related obligations (such as maintaining appropriate border security and/or appropriate encryption for data during its transmission).
The changes in HIPAA compliance mean that providers cannot simply treat EHR vendors as a “black box” into which providers place PHI, and rely on the EHR vendor’s representations that they know best regarding security. In addition, because the scope of HIPAA now covers more than just covered entities and business associates, but also most subcontractors of business associates that handle PHI, more entities are at risk for substantial fines for failing to comply with the applicable security standards. All providers should work with their counsel to analyze and address compliance with the final regulations.
The following chart is a summary of data breach information available on privacyrights.org of approximately 3,700 data breaches that have become publicly known, affecting in excess of 600,000,000 records of personal information, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other sensitive information.
This chart illustrates the number of private records lost by year, starting in 2005. The two most common ways that data is lost are either as a result of a portable device (PORT) that is lost or stolen (the orange bar), or direct hacking/malware (HACK) (the green bar). The reader will note that there was a spike in lost records in 2009. A major contributing factor to this loss was a single hacking incident involving Heartland Payment Systems involving in excess of 130,000,000 records, combined with a loss by the Veterans Administration of 76,000,000 records that same year.
In terms of the major business industry categories, the industry sector with the largest data losses over time (2005-2013) is the financial and insurance industry (BSF), followed by retail (BSR) and government (GOV) (the latter being most impacted by losses at the Veterans Administration among government agencies).
US Copyright law provides generally broad protections for the creators (“authors”) of original works of authorship. In particular, authors have the exclusive right to copy, distribute, publicly perform, prepare derivative works from, and publicly display their works. In addition, these rights last for a relatively long time – for an original fixed in a tangible medium – the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. One of the problems with the broad protection is that creative people who want to start with the work of another may be stifled by the licensing regime of an author. Absent “fair use” (a defense raised by an infringer and one that depends on the facts and circumstances of each use), an artist may just be unable to use a work without risking a lawsuit. One partial solution to this problem is the Creative Commons licensing.
The Commons is a copyright licensing regime (actually a set of several kinds of licenses) and searchable database that permits users to obtain re-usable creative works that are not subject to the same restrictions under US copyright law. The database permits a user to search in a variety of individual databases for a particular work, and the database result will then display the use restrictions, if any, based on the applicable license. The database also contains many works that are in the copyright “public domain,” which are works that require no license at all to be used (generally, works published before 1923 are now in the public domain). In reverse, authors of works who wish the work to be more freely distributed can publish works to the Creative Commons under one of the applicable licensing agreements.
The result is that more creative works are available that require less from persons that want to use them with less risk and potentially less licensing expense.

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