Steptoe & Johnson LLP (LexBlog United States)

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has announced policy changes designed to strengthen its administrative enforcement of U.S. export controls. In a memorandum released on June 30, Matthew Axelrod, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement at BIS, outlined four new policy changes including (1) significantly higher penalties for egregious violations, (2) elimination.

On June 15, 2022, the District Court for the Southern District of New York dealt a blow to former Citigroup Inc. (Citi) trader Rohan Ramchandani in his malicious prosecution lawsuit against his former employer.[1] Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron denied Ramchandani’s motion to compel Citi to produce attorney notes of DOJ meetings and other privileged...

In an opinion last week, Judge Cote dismissed a copyright infringement case brought by the maker of certain “HomeGirl Hotline” TikTok videos against the comedian Michael Che, arising out of sketches on Che’s television show involving a fictional mobile app called “homegrrl.” Both the plaintiff’s videos and Che’s sketches generally involved calling upon a “homegirl”...

It’s that time again on the Congressional calendar. All the big, bipartisan tech initiatives that looked so good a few months ago are beginning to compete for time on the floor like fat men desperate to get through a small door. And tech lobbyists are doing their best to handicap the bills they hate while...

Fifth and final post on the Order No. 2222 compliance filings issued on June 17, 2022: “CAISO 2222 Order” and the “NYISO 2222 Order.” The post covers the topics: Modifications to List of Resources in Aggregation; Market Participation Agreements; and Effective Date. Topic 10: Modifications to List of DERs in Aggregation In Order No. 2222,...

Second post on the Order No. 2222 compliance filings issued on June 17, 2022: “CAISO 2222 Order” and the “NYISO 2222 Order.” The post covers the topic Eligibility to Participate in RTO/ISO Markets through a Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Aggregator, which the Commission subdivided into several subtopics. Topic 5: Eligibility to Participate in RTO/ISO Markets...

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) supports the existing prohibition on the importation of goods into the United States made with forced labor under Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. § 1307).  Enforcement of the UFLPA began on June 21, 2022.  Companies with supply chains that have links to Xinjiang...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast begins by digging into a bill more likely to transform tech regulation than most of the proposals you’ve actually heard of – a bipartisan effort to repeat U.S. Senator John Cornyn’s bipartisan success in transforming the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) four years ago. The...

On June 17, 2022, FERC issued its first two orders on Order No. 2222 compliance filings, the “CAISO 2222 Order” and the “NYISO 2222 Order.” Both ISOs had FERC-approved, pre-existing DER Aggregation programs (i.e., aggregation programs beyond Order No. 719’s demand response aggregation) in place prior to making their July 2021 compliance filings.  Given the...

On June 7, 2022, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA), which seeks to create a complete regulatory framework for digital assets. This is the second in a series of blogs on this groundbreaking bipartisan legislation. Click here for a general overview of the bill and...

In an opinion Monday, Judge Marrero ruled that the First Amendment protected the right of a group of law professors to publish online their attorney grievance complaints against prosecutors in Queens who had been involved in alleged prosecutorial misconduct. The professors received a letter from New York City’s Corporation Counsel claiming that the disclosure of...

This bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is an interview with Amy Gajda, author of “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy.” Her book is an accessible history of the often obscure and sometimes “curlicued” interaction between the individual right to privacy and the public’s (or at least the press’s) right...

This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is dominated by things that U.S. officials said in San Francisco last week at the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) conference. We summarize what they said and offer our views of why they said it. Bobby Chesney, returning to the podcast after a long absence, helps us assess Russian warnings that the...

On June 7, 2022, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the Responsible Financial Innovation Act (RFIA). This highly anticipated legislation is the first attempt at developing a comprehensive regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and digital assets. The RFIA builds off proposals introduced this Congress and includes a number of provisions related to...

In May 2022, with some, but relatively little, acknowledgment in the trade press, the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB), at the behest of the Department of Energy (DOE), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), announced its intention to “create standardized, technology-neutral grid service definitions that can benefit both...

In an opinion Tuesday, Judge Crotty preliminarily enjoined New York State from enforcing unauthorized practice of law (“UPL”) regulations against a non-profit that counsels New Yorkers facing debt-collection actions (see our prior coverage here). Judge Crotty found that UPL regulations were commonly upheld as regulating conduct, but, as applied to the that the program at...

At least that’s the lesson that Paul Rosenzweig and I distill from the recent 11th Circuit decision mostly striking down Florida’s law regulating social media platforms’ content “moderation” rules. We disagree flamboyantly on pretty much everything else – including whether the Court will intervene before judgment in a pending 5thCircuit case where the appeals court...

On May 18, 2022, 235 self-described “consumer, anti-monopoly advocates, public interest and environmental organizations, and rooftop solar companies” (Petitioners), petitioned the FTC to exercise its authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act to study electric utility industry practices that they claim impede renewable energy competition and harm consumers (the FTC Petition) (link and press...

On 16 May 2022, the Council of the EU (the Council) decided for the third time to prolong its restrictive measures against cyber-attackers threatening the EU, its Member states or its allies. The measures are set to remain in place for a further three years until May 18, 2025. The Council’s press release on this is...

This week’s Cyberlaw Podcast covers efforts to pull the Supreme Court into litigation over the Texas law treating social media platforms like common carriers and prohibiting them from discriminating based on viewpoint when they take posts down. I predict that the Court won’t overturn the appellate decision staying an unpersuasive district court opinion. Mark MacCarthy and I...

Further to our blog piece at the beginning of this year, there have been additional developments at the EU and national levels in respect to gun-jumping in merger cases. In general, a breach of EU or national rules could occur when the merging parties (i) fail to notify their merger when the relevant thresholds have...

In an opinion Wednesday, Judge Rakoff allowed the handbag maker Hermés to proceed with a trademark suit against the individual responsible for a series of non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) associated with digital images of “faux-fur-covered versions” of Hermés’s “Birkin” handbag. An example of a “MetaBirkin” image is below: The defendant argued that he has a First...

In Order No. 872, FERC provided PURPA purchasers and other interested parties the opportunity to protest QF re-certifications if a “substantive change” was being made, although the Final Rule was less than perfectly clear as to what constituted a substantive change. FERC stated in Order No. 872-A that substantive changes that may be subject to...

In an opinion Thursday, Judge Swain granted judgement on the pleadings to the makers of the musical Vape, declaring that under the “fair use” doctrine, Vape does not infringe on the copyright in the classic theatrical work Grease. Vape holds itself out as a parody of Grease. The copyright holders argued that rather than commenting on Grease...

Nick Weaver kicks off a wide-ranging episode by celebrating Treasury’s imposition of sanctions on a cryptocurrency mixer for facilitating the laundering of stolen cryptocurrency. David Kris calls on Justice to step up its game in the face of this competition, while Nick urges Treasury to next sanction Tornado Cash — and explains why this would...

Retraction: An earlier episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast may have left the impression that I think Google hates mothers. I regret the error. It appears that, in reality, Google only hates Republican mothers who are running for office. But to all appearances, Google really, really hates them. A remarkable, and apparently damning study disclosed that during...

In an order yesterday, in a case involving two people who were formerly in a relationship and who now accuse one another of battery (among many other things), Judge Buchwald resolved various discovery disputes with a warning against “irrelevant invective”: As the Court’s rulings demonstrate, these motions would have been unnecessary if counsel had conducted...

I’m unable to resist pointing out the profound bias built into everything Silicon Valley does these days. Google, it turns out, is planning to tell enterprise users of its word processor that words like “motherboard” and “landlord” are insufficiently inclusive for use in polite company. We won’t actually be forbidden to use those words. Yet....

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down two judgments providing guidance on the protection against double jeopardy (the principle ne bis in idem) in competition law cases. Article 50 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Charter) provides that “no one shall be liable to be tried or...

In its PURPA Reform Final Rule (Order No. 872), FERC mentioned the fact that the Idaho PUC had reduced the term of PURPA PPAs to two years (albeit there would be a perpetual new contractual obligation to purchase every two years). The Idaho PUC did so “based on its concern about fixed QF rates, and...