December GDPR Updates: Right to be Forgotten, Access Requests, Facial Recognition and More

EDPB guidelines on the right to be forgotten in search engines. The European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”) released for public comments its draft guidelines on the right to be forgotten under the General Data Protection Regulations (“GDPR”), as it applies to online search engines. 

The draft distinguishes between delisting requests and full erasure requests. Requests to delist seek to ...

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Starts January 1, 2020

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) enters into effect on January 1, 2020, less than two months away. It imposes complex privacy-driven obligations on many organizations. While companies in recent years have dedicated efforts to enter into and maintain compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the CCPA imposes distinguishable requirements with significant implications from legal, technological, administrative ...

Redistributing E-Books Online Constitutes Copyright Infringement, Says EU's High Court

The Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) has held that a company making available second-hand e-books on its website to members of its reading club engages in a “communication to the public” that infringes the author’s rights under the EU Directive 2001/29 on copyrights (the “Copyright Directive”). The CJEU held that the copyright rule of exhaustion, under which ...

Israeli Teens Convicted of Sexual Harassment for Publishing Sexual Videos of their Classmate

Two 13 years-old defendants were accused of filming a Facetime call they had with the victim, who was their classmate. The video portrays the victim performing sexual acts that the defendants requested that she perform. The Juvenile Court attempted to avoid convicting the defendants due to their young age, and despite stating that they have committed the offenses attributed to ...

California AG Releases Proposed Regulation Implementing the CCPA

The new California Consumer Privacy Act (the “CCPA”) set to enter into effect in January 2020, provides  stronger protection to the privacy of California residents, among others, by granting consumers significant rights and requiring businesses that are subject to the CCPA to provide proper notification and obtain consumers’ consent before processing consumers’ personal information. The recently published Attorney General’s proposed ...

US Internet Access Provider Hit with a Billion Dollar Verdict for Copyright Infringement

In late November, Cox Communications, a U.S. Internet access provider, was found liable for the infringing activities of its subscribers based on their uploading and downloading of copyrighted music using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. This month, jurors in a U.S. Federal District Court in Virginia awarded American music publishing companies a total of one billion dollars in compensatory damages for more ...

Unprecedented Recovery of Damages for Violation of the Israeli Spam Law

A company organizing conferences for its clients, which transmitted promotional text messages and emails for its clients to about eight hundred thousand (800,000) individuals who each received, on average, forty-seven (47) messages, was ordered to pay a represented class of plaintiffs about 200 million NIS (approximately US $58 million) in compensatory damages for violation of Article 30(a) of the Israeli ...

US and UK Sign Treaty for Sharing Personal Data from Suspects' Online Accounts

The United States and the United Kingdom have entered into the world’s first-ever CLOUD Act Agreement that will allow American and British law enforcement agencies, with appropriate authorization, to demand electronic data regarding serious crime, including terrorism, child sexual abuse, and cybercrime, directly from technology companies based in the other country, rather requesting the information through the other country’s governmental ...