Technology Insights
Analysis and practical guides on technology.
150 articles, checklists, and guides on technology law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Open Source Software Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
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 dependency tree that changes hourly turn a tractable obligation into an overwhelming one. This checklist breaks it into discrete, checkable steps: scoping by distribution surface, component discovery (lockfiles, vendored code, binaries and containers), license classification along the permissive/weak/strong-copyleft spectrum, copyleft and AGPL exposure analysis, attribution, remediation (fix, remove, isolate, or comply), a continuous program with a tiered license policy and CI-integrated scanning, SBOM generation, M&A diligence, and incident response. Each step carries enough legal context—anchored in Jacobsen v. Katzer, the SFC v. Vizio third-party-beneficiary theory, the Orange/Entr'ouvert award, and concrete MIT/BSD/Apache/LGPL/GPL/AGPL obligations—to show why it matters. It closes with common mistakes, primary authority, and related mclaw.io resources.
State Consumer Privacy Laws: The CCPA, the CPRA, and the Multi-State Patchwork
The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law, and roughly twenty states have filled the gap with statutes that are similar enough to invite a single compliance program and different enough to punish anyone who builds one carelessly. This article maps that landscape. It explains the structure every one of these laws shares, applicability thresholds, controller and processor roles, consumer rights, opt-out mechanics, sensitive data treatment, and data protection assessments, then identifies the places where the statutes genuinely diverge and where those divergences create real operational work. California receives extended treatment because it remains the outlier: it has a dedicated regulator, it covers employee and business-to-business data, it treats cross-context behavioral advertising as sharing, and it is the only comprehensive state law with a private right of action, for data breaches. The article then covers the sector-specific statutes that often matter more in practice than the comprehensive ones, including Illinois biometric law, Washington health data law, the federal video privacy statute, and the wiretapping theories driving website tracking litigation. It closes with a program build-out, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Responding to a Website Accessibility Demand Letter or Lawsuit: A Practical Guide
This guide takes a business and its lawyer through the response to a website accessibility demand letter or Title III lawsuit, from the day it arrives to the point where the business is no longer an easy target. It opens with the decision points that shape everything else: whether a complaint has been filed, which law applies, whether the claim is true, and whether this is one letter or a campaign. Fifteen numbered steps then cover deadlines, preservation, investigating the plaintiff and firm, standing and forum analysis, insurance tender, a privileged audit, a remediation plan, the first response, the fight-or-settle decision, Rule 12 motions, mootness strategy, Unruh and New York exposure, settlement terms, consent decree terms, and repeat-target protection. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, pitfalls, timing, and cost. A timeline and cost table, a worked example involving an online-only retailer sued in New York and threatened in California, notes for plaintiffs' counsel, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Deciding Whether Your Website or App Must Verify Age: A Practical Guide
This guide takes an operator from the first question, whether any age law reaches the product, through the decision to redesign, exclude minors, block a state, or verify. It gives coverage tests for each family of law, a method for measuring adult-content share, and a way to check whether an injunction actually protects you. It compares verification methods by cost, accuracy, and legal exposure, and gives sample language for notices, consent, and privacy policies. It explains how to run parental consent, minor defaults, and app store signals. It sets out a low-cost path for small operators, a response plan for attorney general inquiries and private suits, and the mistakes that cause the most trouble. Worked examples follow a recipe community, an audio publisher, and a small game studio.
Reporting or Receiving a Security Vulnerability: A Practical Guide for Researchers and Companies
This guide follows a vulnerability report from both ends: the researcher who found the flaw and the company that receives the report or a payment demand. Track A takes the researcher from the moment of discovery through stopping and documenting the testing, finding the right channel, getting advice, drafting the report, asking for compensation without conditioning silence, and publishing on a fixed timeline. Track B takes the company from intake and verification through evidence preservation, classifying the sender, the notification analysis, law enforcement and insurer decisions, response letters, and the difference between paying a bounty and paying an extortionist. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, pitfalls, timing, and cost. A timeline and cost table, an extended worked example involving a pharmacy refill portal, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Cybersecurity Program Toolkit
Nearly every legal regime that touches data now requires the same handful of controls, described in slightly different words, and the organizations that fail examinations and lose claims are rarely the ones that lacked a framework. They are the ones whose risk assessment covered part of the environment, whose backups had never been restored, whose vendor agreements had a thirty-day breach clock, and whose incident response plan had never been exercised. This toolkit builds a program that satisfies the overlapping requirements at once: the data and asset inventory that scopes everything, the risk assessment the regulations actually require, the technical and administrative controls in priority order, vendor oversight, incident response and the notification clocks, insurance, and the governance and testing that make it durable. It closes with the notification clocks that run simultaneously under different regimes, the insurance that responds, and the testing cadence that keeps the program honest.
Data Breach Class Actions: Article III Standing, Negligence Claims, and Forensic Report Privilege
This article explains how a data breach becomes a class action, usually within days of the notice letter, and what decides those cases. It reads the Supreme Court's standing trilogy and every circuit's response closely, including the widening split between the Fourth Circuit's Holmes decision and the Second, First, and Third Circuits. It covers the merits theories (negligence and the economic loss rule, implied contract, CCPA section 1798.150, and consumer statutes), then the forensic report cases from Target through Capital One, Clark Hill, Rutter's, and the 2025 Morrill order. It closes with MDL practice, the Marriott class certification saga, what settlements contain, and how regulators overlap. Plaintiffs' lawyers, defense counsel, general counsel, and curious judges will each find the doctrine and the practical consequences side by side.
Website Accessibility Defense Toolkit: Demand Responses, Privileged Audit Engagements, and Remediation Records
This toolkit collects the working papers a business and its counsel need to defend a website accessibility demand or Title III lawsuit and to keep the next one from succeeding. It includes four demand response letters for different postures, a three-party privileged audit engagement letter, a remediation plan and log, a litigation hold notice, an insurer tender letter, an accessibility statement, settlement agreement key terms, vendor contract clauses, an exposure and strategy memo outline, and a mootness declaration outline. Each template states its purpose, owner, and timing, and is followed by drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. A running example follows a regional outdoor retailer through a demand from a Florida firm. An index table at the top maps each template to the step it supports.
Consumer Health Data Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist runs a full compliance review of a product or business that handles health-related data outside, or partly outside, HIPAA. It moves in phases through scope and privilege, the HIPAA boundary, applicable state and federal law, traffic capture, ad-tech, consent, public statements, vendors, sale, consumer rights, security, location, breach decisions, legal process, special data categories, litigation readiness, and recurring governance. Each task names its authority, with notes on how the requirement works in practice and red flags that should stop the review and bring in counsel. It reflects the law as of November 2026, including the FTC's 2026 actions and the 2026 appellate decisions on health pixels.
Children's and Student Privacy Toolkit: COPPA, FERPA, and Age-Appropriate Design
Three separate regimes govern data about young people, and they ask different questions. COPPA regulates collection from children under thirteen and answers with parental consent. FERPA and the state student privacy statutes regulate education records and answer with school control and use restrictions. The design codes and the minor provisions of state privacy statutes regulate the product experience for all minors and answer with defaults, regardless of what anyone consented to. This toolkit runs all three in sequence, from the audience analysis and data inventory through consent, retention and deletion, school-context obligations, design defaults, age assurance, and the international rules that make a single thirteen-year-old age gate insufficient for a global service.
Privacy and Data Protection Toolkit: Building and Running a Privacy Program
This toolkit is a roadmap for building, running, and defending a privacy and data-protection program in the United States and across borders. It walks the program life cycle: mapping and inventorying personal data, standing up governance, providing notices and obtaining consent, minimizing and retiring data, and complying with the sectoral and state-law patchwork (HIPAA, GLBA, COPPA, CCPA/CPRA), the GDPR and international transfer rules after Schrems II, and biometric statutes. It closes with breach and incident response and vendor management. Each stage links to mclaw.io checklists and articles plus the controlling statutes, regulators, and leading authorities. It is written for privacy counsel, compliance leads, founders, and product teams who need both a strategic overview and the operative rule for each step.
Acquiring a Domain Name Anonymously and Safely: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a buyer through acquiring a domain name without announcing who is behind the offer, in the order the decisions actually arise. It covers clearance and dated intent records before any contact, reading the public record, choosing among a broker, a lawyer, and a stealth entity, what may and may not be said in negotiation, and how to set a price. It then moves through diligence on the seller's authority, agreement terms, escrow, the exact closing sequence under ICANN's current and newly adopted transfer rules, and the post-closing migration of DNS, email, and certificates. Two worked examples show how a small business and a public company would run the process differently. A section on common mistakes and a short section for sellers round it out. The reader should finish knowing what to do first on Monday and what to avoid saying in the first email.