If you or your company has ever registered a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) Agent with the US Copyright Office, you must re-register your DMCA Agent at the US Copyright Office website by the end of this calendar year or risk losing DMCA Safe Harbor protection. 

Many websites or webservices allow their users or clients to upload so-called “user generated content” (“UGC”), such as comments, reviews, photographs, video and other media files. While allowing UGC is critical to the operations of many websites and webservices, there is a distinct danger in handling UGC: specifically, if a user uploads material that they do not own or have the rights to, the webservice or website may face allegations of copyright infringement, which can carry a very hefty fee – up to $150,000 per infringed work, in addition to the costs of litigation and defense.

FINRA recently published its Annual Regulatory and Examination Priorities Letter (“Priorities Letter”). The Priorities Letter is an opportunity for FINRA member firms to be able to anticipate the activities that FINRA plans to review during upcoming exams while also learning directly from FINRA what weaknesses it has observed in other firms during past exams.

Failure to properly address these identified areas of concern could result in a determination by FINRA that a member firm and its registered representatives have engaged in activity that adversely affects investors or market integrity. In 2016, FINRA levied more fines and penalties against member firms than any previous year in its existence. Therefore, ensuring compliance within the areas highlighted in this year’s Priorities Letter will enable Firms to avoid being in FINRA’s ever expansive, overly zealous, seemingly random, but always costly crosshairs.

As all employers know, employees classified as “exempt” under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) or any of the various similar state statutes need not be compensated for what would otherwise be considered overtime.  These employees are paid a fixed salary and it does not matter whether they work 30 hours per week or 60.  Their salary is their compensation.  But for their classification, these employees would be entitled to time and one-half for all hours worked in a week over 40.  Thus, the savings for a company can be substantial.  Consequently, companies often are “very generous” in who they classify as “exempt”.  But, misclassifying someone as exempt can be costly!

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) published revised Cybersecurity Regulations on December 28, 2016 that have pushed back the effective date of the regulations to March 1, 2017. The core provisions of the regulations remain intact and third parties, including law firms, will be affected as the requirement of entities covered by the Department for “Third Party Service Vendor Management” results in enhanced questions of law firms and other service providers on their cybersecurity and perhaps cybersecurity audits by the clients.