Early 2019 and 2018 have seen rapid changes in employment law in California. The rise of social media by employers and employees in the workplace and in employment relationships creates novel issues in employment and social media law. Here are links to some presentations I have done focusing on a few issues regarding social media and employment law.

Here is video from a social media update I prepared for an audience of employers in 2018:

And here are some slides I prepared from a 2017 mid-year update on social media in the workplace:

Next up, on March 16, 2019, my fellow lawyer in the community Hanna Shafran and I will be presenting an ethics CLE at South by Southwest directed at lawyers on “Covfefe Talk: Social Media Ethics Rules for 2019.” Come say hello if you’ll be in Austin this March!

Here’s my “Art of Law” interview with Lynn Rosenblum, toy law professor and expert in toy industy customs and practices. Lynn and I talk about the state of the toy industry, some toy industry jargon, and how Lynn got involved in this quirky and fascinating industry.

Lynn and I previously worked together on the Hasbro My Little Pony case discussed in this article.

Shout out and special thanks to Matthew Eisenberg Productions for production and post-production services. Enjoy!

Had a great time as always guest hosting on my favorite law netcast, This Week in Law, with Denise Howell and J. Michael Keyes, on June 22, 2018. Glad I could discuss Deep Fakes, “Gen Z” (persons between 13 and 23), Hamilton, ticket-buying bots, the Music Modernization Act and more.

What was yesterday’s “Mergers of Dystopia” (This Week in Law 247, February 21, 2014) is today’s At&T-Time Warner Merger, plus bonus California Net Neutrality Bill dilution.

Watch the replay here:

This Week in Law 427 with Denise Howell, Mike Keyes and Lisa Borodkin “World War Gen Z”

Oh, and p.s. don’t call it Velcro. It’s “hook and loop.”

One year after presenting “Navigating the YouTube Safe Harbor” at the 2017 SxSW 2017 Music Festival with Kelly Klaus, John Tehranian and David Schelzel, I find that the SxSW organizers have posted audio from our presentation on SoundCloud.

(Thanks, SxSW!)

Cut to 2018. Former disrupters Netflix and Amazon Studios have aligned themselves with traditional Big Content to sue the makers of Dragon Box and Tick Box for their online streaming devices. The complaints rely in part on the marketing language used by the defendants.

On February 13, 2018, Tickbox stipulated to a preliminary injunction where they agreed to (among other things), not include, provide links to, curate, or create add-ons or otherwise technologically enable third-party cyberlockers or streaming sites that Tick Box knows or has reason to know transmits pirated content. (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are not defined as such transmitters).

The Dragon Box is at an earlier stage, with no preliminary injunction application filed and no response due until March 5, 2018. Dragon Box’s attorney had some interesting quotes in Ars Technica on the stakes raised by this case, if it does not go the plaintiffs’ way.

Netflix and chill, this is not.

Had a great time guesting on This Week in Law 364 with Denise Howell and Emory Roane. We talked about warrants for fingerprints (2 thumbs, 8 fingers down), facial recognition technology chilling effects, anti-surveillance, anti-drone camouflage fashion, the “Encryption Commission,” and much more.

We talked about the ethics and morality of smart cars and AI, which of course brought up the smart car scene in Hot Tub Time Machine 2:

On the note of dystopian surveillance fashion, Chanel showed in Paris a brilliant read-to-wear show for Spring 2017 with a futuristic surveillance, server farm theme. Check it out:

Finally, a small plug for our South By Southwest 2017 panel, Navigating the Youtube Safe Harbor with John Tehranian of One LLP and Kelly Klaus of Munger, Tolles and Olsen. See you in Austin, I hope.

Both Bloomberg and Marie Claire broke stories last Friday that the FTC is going to pursue investigation of celebrity endorsements that aren’t clearly advertisements.

The announcement is the continuation of the FTC getting tougher with entertainment-based companies that do not clearly follow FTC Guidelines such as the proposed consent order in the Warner Bros. settlement with the FTC over “Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor” game influencers with influencers such as YouTube star PewDiePie.

This blog previously reported the “Pony Stars” Disney’s $3 million consent judgment with the FTC over alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting the data of thousands of children under age 13 without parental consent.

The FTC‘s interest in extending regulatory probes into the music, gaming and children’s entertainment industries is the writing on the wall that players in those industries need to rethink the old Hollywood adage “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” If the publicity is paid for, you better tell the public who paid and how much, or else face FTC scrutiny.

On a somewhat related note, more ideas about “How to Act as a Business in a World in Which User Feedback and Reviews Are Critical to Your Reputation and Business” can be found in the presentation that Bennett Kelly and I did for the 12th Annual Stanford 2015 E-Commerce Best Practices Conference presentation on June 8, 2015 with Laurence Wilson of Yelp, Ed Chansky of Greenberg Traurig and attorney Francine Ward.

Slides of the Stanford presentation below:

(Photo Credit: Ted Murphy under Creative Commons license via flickr) Shoutout to my old BlogWorld 2009 panelists on “Sponsored Conversations” Ted Murphy, Jeremiah Owyang, Jennifer Leggio and Wendy Piersall.

The big media mergers just keep on coming. AT&T wants to acquire DirectTV, Comcast is ready to gobble up Time Warner, and Sprint is finalizing its merger with T-Mobile.

Antitrust Professor Spencer Waller, FCC watchdog Ryan Radia, and I discussed such mergers with Evan Brown on This Week in Law 247, “Mergers of Dystopia.” Here’s the video:

A Dumb Starbucks opened in my neighborhood over the weekend.

The Guardian asked me to write an op-ed piece on it, so I did.

“Dumb Starbucks was the perfect crime, but Starbucks was smart to play dumb.”

A casual poll of my Los Feliz friends yielded a generally positive range of reactions. The stunt was funny, and timely. I had just attended a Digital LA panel on the future of Silicon Beach and Hollywood. In a world where there is a demonstrated consumer demand to skip through televison commercials (see Fox Broad. Co. v. Dish Network L.L.C., 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 1657, 2014 WL 260572 (9th Cir. Cal. Jan. 24, 2014), a/k/a the “Dish Hopper” case), what is the future of the television commercial? I hope this is it.

I did find a funny typo in LEXIS misspelling Illinois’ anti-dilution statute as “antidelusion.” If only states could eliminate delusions so easily.

Anyway, the whole thing was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more terrible advice from Nathan and doomed retail establishments next to my dry cleaner.

Nathan Fielder says he’s going to open a Dumb Starbucks in Brooklyn next week. Let’s just hope it’s in Williamsburg.

We had a lot of fun recording Episode 243 of This Week in Law webcast with Denise Howell and Evan Brown. Among other stories in our rundown, I found the one about the lonesome computer programmer who “hacked” OKcupid.com to find his girlfriend particularly charming. No, I don’t think he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but it’s fun to think about.

It’s also fun to think about the future of Bitcoin, which we also discussed. The two economists who appeared as the guests on This Week in Law 244 (Stan Liebowitz, James Miller) opined that Bitcoin is essentially a shell game until the regulators catch up with it.

But with insider traders like Mathew Martoma sucking value out of the regulated markets $245 million at a time, is it irrational to put one’s trust in those developing the Bitcoin protocol? There is no inherent connection to illegal activity. Transactions would be totally traceable in metadata, unlike with cash, as long as the transactions stay within the US.

Seems more like the bad risks driving out the good, if you view the financial markets as risk pools. We now have other options. I’d accept Bitcoin for services. Would you?

In episode 194 of This Week in Law, Denise Howell, Evan Brown, and newcomer (to me) Kevin Thompson and I had a really on-depth discussion of Aaron Swartz’s prosecution and what it means for the future of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

One hidden gem that I suggest looking at is Evan Brown’s wrap-up of the most interesting internate law cases of last year. It’s a little buried in the show notes but you’ll find it in the bookmark called “PDF Link”.

I noted a disturbing chilling effect on Evan Brown’s comments on TWiL from last Friday in episode 208, “The Devil Wears Prenda.”

It’s very weird to speak openly about the fact that one is not speaking openly, and especially coming from a technology law commentator. Look for a more robust blog post on that score in the near future.