US Regulators & Your Cryptocurrency: It’s Complicated

December 22, 2017

This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll examine the US regulations that impact cryptocurrency businesses. Many describe bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as being unregulated. As a blanket statement, this is not true. What is...

Year-End Maintenance for a Healthy Business

November 29, 2017

The end of another year presents an opportunity for you to take stock of how your business has developed, and to think carefully about whether you have kept pace with your legal needs. MGA encourages you to consider the...

Equity Dilution: Is the Juice Is Worth the Squeeze?

October 2, 2017

If you’ve ever made orange juice from concentrate, you probably already have a good feel for how equity dilution works. When you put the orange juice concentrate in a pitcher, you have a small amount of, well, really strong...

DMCA Safe Harbor: Protecting Yourself from Copyright Infringement

September 28, 2017

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512, (“DMCA”) provides Internet communications service providers, including website operators, with immunity from copyright infringement liability for, among other things, infringing material posted on its sites by its users, provided the...

The Pitfall of Trademark Genericide: When Household Names and Brands Collide

July 12, 2017

Escalator. Heroin. Dry Ice. Teleprompter. Laundromat. Each of these words or phrases were originally coined as trademarks, though have since lost their distinctive nature and exclusivity as they slowly became part of the American lexicon in the years since their introduction....

Was Silicon Valley “Bro Culture” to Blame for Uber CEO’s Resignation?

July 6, 2017

Ride-sharing giant Uber‘s Travis Kalanick has been forced to step down from his role as CEO of the company a week after taking an “indefinite leave of absence” amid growing backlash over his leadership and corporate culture at Uber....

Trademark Case Roundup

June 29, 2017

As we recently reported in our blog post Disparaging Trademark or Reclaimed Slur? The Supreme Court Weighs In, the high court ruled 8-0 in Matal v. Tam that the Lanham Act’s ban on disparaging marks was an unconstitutional violation of the First...

Disparaging Trademark or Reclaimed Slur? The Supreme Court Weighs In Matal v. Tam

June 21, 2017

In a unanimous decision in Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. __ (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law prohibiting the registration of disparaging trademarks or service marks was unconstitutional under the First Amendment and that the United States Patent and Trademark...

Benefit Corporations and Purpose-Driven Commerce

May 12, 2017

 “Brands and consumers will continue to come together to form a more cohesive and fluid business ecosystem….The new era of business is about creating enterprises that work together in tandem to drive commerce that matters.” – Billee Howard, We-Commerce...

What’s the Point of New York’s LLC Publication Requirement?

April 27, 2017

Every new limited liability company (LLC) organized under the laws of the State of New York must announce its formation by publishing a notice in two newspapers for a period of six weeks, which could cost the LLC up...

A Virtual Reality Check – Oculus v. ZeniMax: Applying Copyright Law to VR

April 17, 2017

On February 1, 2017, a Texas jury found Facebook subsidiary Oculus VR, Inc. liable for $500 million in damages in its dispute with ZeniMax over Oculus Rift, a virtual reality technology acquired by Facebook in 2014. The jury found...

“Cannabusiness” in the U.S.

March 27, 2017

What’s Kosher, What’s Crowded, and What Will Get Crushed? As public opinion continues to shift in favor of legalizing marijuana and state legislatures respond accordingly, many people, including investment firms and financial analysts, believe that legalized cannabis and cannabis-related...