Intellectual Property and Technology Insights

Analysis and practical guides on intellectual property and technology.

17 articles, checklists, and guides on intellectual property and technology law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice — for a specific matter, contact the firm.

Intellectual Property and TechnologyTrade Secret

Building a Trade Secret Protection Program from Scratch

Every company holds information that is valuable precisely because it is secret, but trade secret law protects that information only if the owner takes reasonable measures to keep it confidential. This guide explains, in plain language, how to build a protection program that satisfies that requirement, following a fictional robotics startup as it identifies its secrets and secures them across physical, technical, and administrative dimensions. It covers what qualifies as a trade secret under the DTSA and UTSA, how to inventory and classify confidential information, the contractual protections that supplement the statutes, the easily-missed Section 1833(b) whistleblower-immunity notice that can forfeit a plaintiff's punitive damages, employee training, and the high-risk moment of employee departures. It incorporates the 2025-2026 collapse of the FTC's nationwide non-compete ban and explains what that means for protection strategy, and it closes with how trade secret protection coordinates with patents, copyrights, and open-source obligations.

Casey Scott McKayJune 16, 202657 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyCopyright

How to File a DMCA Takedown Notice (And Respond to One)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's notice-and-takedown system is the engine of online copyright enforcement: a compliant notice obliges a hosting provider to remove material to keep its safe harbor, and a counter-notice can restore it unless the rights holder sues. This guide covers both sides—drafting effective notices, the six statutory elements and the deficiencies that sink them, the counter-notice procedure and its consent to federal jurisdiction, and the doctrines that decide everything around the edges: the safe-harbor framework of Section 512(a)–(d), the specific-knowledge and red-flag standards from Viacom v. YouTube, the repeat-infringer rule that cost Cox its safe harbor in BMG v. Cox, Section 512(f) misrepresentation liability and the fair-use duty announced in Lenz v. Universal, and the Section 512(h) subpoena. It adds annotated sample documents, platform-specific practice (Content ID, e-commerce, search), and the international picture after the EU Digital Services Act became fully applicable in 2024. Written for creators, platforms, and counsel on either side.

Casey Scott McKayApril 24, 202643 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyIP and IT in Corporate Transactions

Drafting Enforceable Non-Disclosure Agreements for Technology Transactions

Non-disclosure agreements are the most common contract in commercial life and among the most carelessly drafted, so that many protect far less than the parties assume—and some fail outright when a court finally reads them. This guide teaches how to draft NDAs that courts will actually enforce, following a fictional robotics startup as it shares its crown-jewel algorithm with a prospective partner. It works through every major provision—the definition of confidential information, the standard exclusions, the non-use versus non-disclosure distinction, marking, term and survival (with perpetual protection for trade secrets), compelled disclosure, return of materials, remedies and injunctive relief, and choice of law—explaining why each matters and where drafters go wrong. It gives particular attention to the technology industry's hardest problems: protecting source code, the residual-knowledge dilemma, reverse-engineering restrictions, and the often-overlooked DTSA Section 1833(b) whistleblower-immunity notice that can decide whether double damages and attorneys' fees are on the table. The goal is the conceptual framework and practical judgment to build agreements that protect what matters rather than merely appearing to.

Casey Scott McKayDecember 7, 202549 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyCopyright

Open Source Licensing Landmines in Enterprise Software Development

More than 96% of commercial codebases contain open source components, yet most companies have no idea what those components obligate them to do until an acquisition, an IPO, or a demand letter forces the question. This article maps the open source licensing landscape and its hidden traps, following a fictional enterprise that discovers GPL code buried in its flagship product six weeks before a deal closes. It explains how open source licenses weaponize copyright, why violating one is potential infringement rather than mere breach under Jacobsen v. Katzer, and how the permissive-versus-copyleft taxonomy and the strong/weak/network copyleft spectrum actually work. It works through the derivative-work and linking debate in concrete technical terms, the license-incompatibility traps that surface in diligence, software composition analysis and SBOMs, and a fast-moving enforcement landscape—SFC v. Vizio's third-party-beneficiary theory, Neo4j v. PureThink on adding restrictions, European damages awards, and the relicensing wave (Elastic, HashiCorp, the BSL and SSPL). It closes with the AI-generated-code provenance problem and a practical audit framework. The throughline: the cheapest moment to defuse an open source landmine is before anyone steps on it.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 27, 202550 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence Key Legal Issues: An Overview

Artificial intelligence has moved from research labs into contracts, hiring pipelines, courtrooms, and creative studios, and the law is scrambling to keep up. This overview maps the legal terrain a business or its counsel must cross before deploying AI: who owns what a machine creates, how copyright and patent law treat the absence of a human author, where biometric and data-privacy statutes like BIPA draw the lines, how anti-discrimination law reaches algorithmic bias, and how to allocate risk in AI contracts. It also covers the liability puzzle of autonomous systems, the obligations the EU AI Act imposes on anyone touching the European market, and the professional-responsibility rules that punished lawyers who trusted a chatbot's citations. The piece pairs primary authority with plain-English explanation and practical guidance for navigating a fast-moving field.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 8, 202535 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyCopyright

Open Source Compliance Checklists: The Complete Collection

Open source compliance fails not because the law is mysterious but because nobody runs the checklist. Hundreds of components, dozens of license families, and a codebase that changes hourly turn a tractable legal obligation into an overwhelming one—until you break it into discrete, checkable steps. This collection is the operational backbone of an open source compliance program: ready-to-use checklists for every stage, from pre-audit scoping and component discovery through license classification, copyleft exposure analysis, gap assessment, remediation, ongoing program maintenance, M&A due diligence, SBOM generation, and incident response. Each checklist carries enough legal context—anchored in real cases like Jacobsen v. Katzer and SFC v. Vizio, and in concrete obligations under the MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, LGPL, AGPL, and MPL licenses—to make clear why the step matters and what happens if you skip it. It is the operational companion to our narrative guide on open source licensing landmines, and the definitive working reference for engineers, in-house counsel, and deal teams who would rather check a box than receive a demand letter.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 6, 202551 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyAdvertising and Unfair Competition

False Advertising and Lanham Act Section 43(a): Competitor Claims in Technology Marketing

This article is the definitive guide to competitor false-advertising claims under Section 43(a)(1)(B) of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. 1125(a), with a focus on technology marketing. It works through the five elements, the standing framework the Supreme Court set in Lexmark v. Static Control, the decisive literal-falsity versus implied-falsity distinction (including the "necessary implication" doctrine), establishment versus non-establishment claims, the contested limits of puffery, materiality, and the full menu of remedies under Section 35. It explains why POM Wonderful v. Coca-Cola lets competitors sue even when a federal regulator polices the same label, surveys the recurring technology battlegrounds (cybersecurity, benchmarks, AI claims, and greenwashing under the FTC Green Guides), compares the NAD self-regulatory alternative with its actual filing fees and burdens, and maps the California and New York overlays. It is written for marketing and legal teams that need to make aggressive but defensible claims.

Casey Scott McKayJuly 26, 202541 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence Key Legal Issues: A Comprehensive Overview for Businesses and Legal Professionals

Artificial intelligence has moved from research laboratories into the operational core of businesses across every industry, creating a fast-moving legal landscape that spans intellectual property, products liability, data privacy, employment, antitrust, professional ethics, and regulatory compliance. This guide examines the key legal issues arising from the commercial development and deployment of AI: protecting AI through patents, copyrights, and trade secrets; the unresolved questions of AI inventorship and authorship after Thaler v. Vidal and Thaler v. Perlmutter; the landmark 2025 copyright rulings on AI training data; products-liability frameworks for autonomous systems; biometric and data-protection duties under BIPA, the GDPR, and the EU AI Act; workplace-discrimination risk from AI hiring tools under Title VII and the four-fifths rule; the professional-responsibility duties that ABA Formal Opinion 512 and Mata v. Avianca impose on lawyers using generative AI; antitrust exposure from algorithmic pricing; and the treatment of AI assets in transactions and bankruptcy. It reflects developments through early 2026, including the November 2025 USPTO inventorship guidance, the December 2025 federal executive order targeting state AI laws, and the EU's Digital Omnibus proposal to defer high-risk AI deadlines. It follows a single hypothetical company to make the doctrine concrete and is written for executives, in-house counsel, and outside practitioners alike.

Casey Scott McKayJune 16, 202562 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyCopyright

The Right to Repair Movement: IP Implications for Manufacturers and Consumers

The right to repair movement has crossed from advocacy into enforceable law, reshaping how manufacturers may use copyright, the DMCA, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets to control products after the sale. This article maps the landscape as of mid-2026: at least eight U.S. states with enacted electronics-repair statutes, the new wave of parts-pairing bans, the EU's Right to Repair Directive, the FTC's antitrust suit against John Deere, and the Copyright Office's expanding triennial DMCA exemptions. It explains each intellectual-property lever manufacturers deploy to restrict repair and exactly where the law now blunts it, anchoring the doctrine in primary authority such as Impression Products v. Lexmark, Chamberlain v. Skylink, and Automotive Body Parts Ass'n v. Ford. To keep the analysis concrete, it follows a hypothetical manufacturer and a hypothetical independent shop through the compliance questions the new regime forces. Written for manufacturers, independent repairers, aftermarket suppliers, and the counsel advising them.

Casey Scott McKayMarch 22, 202541 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyPrivacy and Data Security

International Data Transfers After Schrems II: Standard Contractual Clauses and Transfer Impact Assessments

The digital economy runs on cross-border data flows, but for any organization touched by European data protection law those flows carry real legal and financial risk after Schrems II. This article maps the post-Schrems II architecture for moving personal data out of the EEA: the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the Latombe litigation now testing it on appeal; the 2021 modular Standard Contractual Clauses and the Transfer Impact Assessment that Schrems II made mandatory; technical, organizational, and contractual supplementary measures and their limits; Binding Corporate Rules; and the narrow Article 49 derogations. It covers the parallel UK regime, including the December 2025 adequacy renewal through 2031, reviews the enforcement record that gives these rules teeth, and lays out a phased compliance program with a maturity model. The throughline: this framework demands genuine legal analysis rather than contractual box-ticking, and some transfers will not survive that analysis.

Casey Scott McKayFebruary 16, 202547 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyInternet

Data Scraping After hiQ v. LinkedIn: Copyright, Contract, and Computer Fraud Claims

The AI industry's appetite for training data has turned web scraping into one of the most consequential battlegrounds in technology law, implicating computer-fraud, contract, and copyright doctrines that point in different directions. This article explains the landscape in plain language for the two audiences who need it—data collectors and the websites they scrape—following the practices through a single recurring example. It traces the six-year hiQ v. LinkedIn saga and its paradoxical ending, the Supreme Court's narrowing of the CFAA in Van Buren, the contract cases that followed (Meta v. Bright Data and X v. Bright Data), the copyright status of raw data under Feist, and the wave of AI-training copyright suits, including Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta, Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, and the Andersen and New York Times litigation. It covers robots.txt, DMCA Section 1201, trespass to chattels and other common-law theories, and closes with practical risk guidance for both sides plus a detailed FAQ.

Casey Scott McKayJanuary 11, 202552 min read

Intellectual Property and TechnologyTrade Secret

Trade Secrets in the Age of Remote Work and Cloud Computing

The shift to distributed workforces and cloud collaboration dissolved the corporate security perimeter and reshaped the "reasonable measures" requirement at the heart of trade secret law. This article analyzes how courts apply that requirement under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and the Uniform Trade Secrets Act when employees access proprietary information from personal devices, home networks, and cloud platforms the employer cannot control, drawing on a deep bench of authority from PepsiCo v. Redmond through a wave of 2022–2025 remote-work decisions. It translates the case law into a working protection program spanning access controls, multifactor authentication, data-loss prevention, contracts, onboarding, offboarding, departing-employee forensics, and incident response. It explains the DTSA's whistleblower-immunity notice and civil-seizure remedy, the inevitable disclosure doctrine, and the 2025 collapse of the FTC's non-compete rule. Written for in-house counsel, IP and employment practitioners, and the executives responsible for protecting confidential information in hybrid environments.

Casey Scott McKayDecember 12, 202443 min read