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: Licenses, Compliance, and Risk
Open source software now sits inside almost every codebase on earth, which means almost every company is a party to dozens of license contracts it has never read. This guide explains what "open source" actually means under the Open Source Initiative's ten-point definition, walks the license taxonomy from permissive MIT/BSD/Apache through weak-copyleft and the famously "viral" GPL family, and unpacks the hardest questions in the field: what counts as a "derivative work" that triggers copyleft, and when two licenses can lawfully be combined. It covers the landmark enforceability ruling in Jacobsen v. Katzer, the contract-theory turn in SFC v. Vizio, the Neo4j fight over adding restrictions to an open license, the SCO-Linux saga, and the modern compliance toolkit built around software bills of materials (SBOMs). It then maps the live controversies reshaping the field in 2026: the relicensing wave (MongoDB's SSPL, HashiCorp's BUSL, Redis, Elastic), the "open core" business model, and the collision of open source with generative AI trained on public code. The aim is a single, readable reference a general counsel, a developer, and a curious layperson can all follow.
Responding to a Ransomware Attack: A Practical Guide for the First Two Weeks
This guide walks a company and its counsel through the first fourteen days after a ransomware attack, in the order the decisions actually arrive. It starts with the decision points to settle before acting, including whether the organization is a public entity barred from paying, which reporting regimes apply, and what the insurance policy requires. Twelve steps then cover containment without destroying evidence, the counsel-directed two-track forensic structure, insurer notice, law enforcement contact, scoping, the negotiation channel, sanctions screening, the short-clock regulatory reports, the payment decision and its execution or rejection, communications, the breach notification analysis, and litigation readiness. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, pitfalls, timing, and cost drivers. A timeline table, an extended worked example following a public logistics company through all fourteen days, sections for vendors, customers, and public entities, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways complete the guide.
Lookalike Domain Toolkit: Abuse Reports, Registrar Demands, and UDRP and URS Outlines
This toolkit gives working papers for responding to a lookalike domain, ready to copy and fill in. It includes triage and evidence worksheets, a bank call script, a wire recall letter, and a notice to the beneficiary bank, plus a law enforcement referral outline. It offers abuse reports for registrars, hosts, mail providers, and CDNs, a registrar demand letter, and an ICANN compliance complaint outline. It also has URS and UDRP outlines, a TRO package outline with proposed order language, an in rem outline, and a Doe subpoena rider. Customer, staff, counterparty, and insurer communications follow, along with a loss-allocation worksheet, a defensive registration matrix, contract clauses, and a response for a registrant wrongly reported. Each template states its purpose, owner, and timing, and its drafting notes tie the language to the authority behind it.
Software Transactions: An Overview
Software is bought, sold, rented, built, embedded, and resold in a dizzying variety of deals, and the legal rules that govern them are surprisingly unsettled. This guide maps the whole landscape of software transactions—on-premises licenses, SaaS and cloud subscriptions, custom development agreements, and reseller, VAR, and OEM channel deals—and explains how each is structured and why the differences matter. It tackles the foundational puzzle of which law applies (the UCC Article 2 versus common-law debate and the cautionary tale of UCITA), how clickwrap contracts are formed and enforced, who owns the intellectual property when code is written to order, and how data, privacy, and open-source obligations flow through a deal. Worked hypotheticals walk through the negotiation of indemnities, warranties, liability caps, service levels, and source-code escrow, including the modern cloud-escrow analog. It closes with the merger, acquisition, and asset-transfer problems that catch dealmakers off guard, a section on the disputes that actually arise, an FAQ, and cross-links to deeper companion articles.
Software and Open Source Licensing Toolkit: From IP Layers to Compliance Programs
This toolkit is a high-level roadmap and curated library guide for the legal landscape of software and open source licensing. It walks the full terrain: the layered IP that protects software (copyright, patent, trade secret), proprietary licensing models, the major open source license families and their obligations, building an OSS compliance program, software-related M&A and investment diligence, SaaS and cloud distribution questions, and the emerging issues raised by AI-generated code. At each stage it links the firm's articles and checklists alongside the authoritative external references—the Open Source Initiative, SPDX, the canonical GPL/Apache/MIT license texts, and the leading enforcement case, Jacobsen v. Katzer. It is written for software companies, engineering and legal leaders, investors and acquirers, and transactional counsel. Read the roadmap, then drill into the linked review and compliance checklists. License terms are contractual and enforceable—treat compliance as engineering hygiene, not paperwork.
Building a Cybersecurity Compliance Program That Satisfies Regulators: A Practical Guide
Regulators no longer ask whether a company has security; they ask to see the documents that prove a program exists, works, and is overseen. This guide walks through building that program in ten chronological steps: scoping the regimes that apply, appointing accountable people, conducting the written risk assessment, writing the policies, implementing the controls examiners check first, managing vendors, training and testing, building an incident response plan mapped to every reporting clock, reporting to the board and certifying, and preparing for examinations and investigations. Each step identifies the governing requirements under the FTC Act and Safeguards Rule, NYDFS Part 500, the SEC's disclosure rules, HIPAA, CMMC, and state law, together with the evidence a regulator will request and the decisions the company must make. It closes with a realistic twelve-month timeline and cost ranges, common mistakes, a worked example of a New York-licensed online lender building its program from a standing start, an FAQ, and practical takeaways for compliance teams, boards, and the lawyers who advise or examine them.
Paid Vulnerability Disclosure and the Line Between Research and Extortion
A security researcher who asks to be paid for a vulnerability report is not committing a crime, but a researcher who conditions silence on payment probably is, and the difference turns on sequencing, framing, and what is conditioned on what. This article explains why the underlying research is legally uncertain under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after Van Buren v. United States, state computer crime statutes, and the DMCA anti-circumvention rules, and what the Department of Justice's 2022 charging policy does and does not protect. It then sets out the federal and state extortion statutes that govern the demand, including the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. 875(d), and the computer-extortion clause of the CFAA, and identifies the four features that change the character of a payment request. The Uber case, in which the intruders were convicted of extortion and the company's chief security officer was convicted of obstruction and misprision, is examined from both sides. Practical sections show researchers how to structure a lawful paid disclosure, show companies how to respond without creating their own liability, and close with the two emails annotated line by line, an FAQ, and takeaways.
Legal Considerations After Developing a Mobile App
You finished building the app—now the legal work begins. This guide walks the founder, the in-house lawyer, and the curious layperson through everything that should happen between "feature complete" and "live in the store": forming a liability shield, nailing down who actually owns the code, surviving Apple's and Google's developer agreements in a post-Epic v. Apple world, writing a EULA, terms of service, and privacy policy that are actually enforceable, and complying with the alphabet soup of consumer law that governs in-app purchases and subscriptions (ROSCA), kids (COPPA), accessibility (the ADA), advertising, open-source licenses, and export controls. We use a running hypothetical—a meditation app called "Acme Calm"—to make the abstractions concrete. The law here is fast-moving and varies by state and country; treat this as a sophisticated map, not a substitute for counsel. By the end you will know which fires to put out first and which can wait.
POSIX and POSIX Standards: The Unsung Heroes of Operating System Harmony
POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface, standardized as IEEE 1003 and ISO/IEC 9945) is the quiet bedrock that lets software move between operating systems. This article explains what POSIX is, how the IEEE, ISO, The Open Group, and the Austin Group maintain it, and how the Single UNIX Specification and the UNIX trademark fit together. It then turns to the legal questions a technology lawyer and a law firm should care about: whether the application programming interfaces a standard defines can be owned under copyright after Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021); how standard-essential patents and FRAND commitments constrain patent enforcement; the antitrust exposure created by participating in standard-setting organizations; how open-source licenses interact with standardized interfaces; and how government procurement rules incorporate standards like POSIX. The goal is to make the legal connections explicit, accurate, and well-cited for both lawyers and curious technologists.
Pursuing or Defending a Failed Technology Project Claim: A Practical Guide
This guide takes a customer and a vendor, side by side, through a failed software implementation dispute from the first serious warning sign to settlement, arbitration award, or trial. It starts with the decisions that should come before any letter is sent: what the client actually wants (a fixed system, an orderly exit, or money), what the contract stack says, and who else is involved. Twelve numbered steps follow, covering contract triage, evidence preservation, a privileged project assessment, claim and defense mapping, notice and cure, termination and transition, the damages and cap analysis, choosing and starting the forum, pleading fraud and contract claims that survive a motion to dismiss, ESI discovery, experts and summary judgment, and settlement. Each step explains what to do, why, the governing authority, the pitfalls, the timing, and the cost, with separate notes for the customer and for the vendor. A timeline and cost table and an extended worked example involving a logistics company's failed CRM and dispatch rollout show the steps in sequence. Common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Product Security Toolkit: SBOMs, Vulnerability Disclosure, and Recall Decisions
This toolkit collects the documents a product security function actually produces, from the disclosure policy researchers read to the recall decision memorandum that will be read most carefully if something goes wrong. It includes a triage worksheet with the product safety analysis built in, a plain-language decision aid for the reporting standard, a security advisory template written to be defensible, supplier security terms, a support period statement, an end-of-support notification sequence, a multi-jurisdiction reporting map, and a tabletop scenario. Each template is annotated with its purpose, its owner, and the failure it prevents. Each template carries drafting notes on what regulators and enterprise customers actually look for. Adapt everything to the product, the update architecture, and the markets served.
Connected Device Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Connected device obligations come from five bodies of law that converge on a recognizable set of practices, and manufacturers fail on process rather than on doctrine. This checklist covers the whole program: establishing ownership with authority, publishing a disclosure policy researchers will use, running severity-based triage that includes the product safety analysis security teams reliably omit, maintaining a component inventory, committing to and disclosing a support period, and designing so remediation is possible at all. Separate sections cover supplier requirements, marketing claim review, the recall decision, multi-jurisdiction reporting, end of support, and program metrics. It covers design, supply chain, disclosure, update capability, and end-of-support commitments. Every item is written so that a "no" tells you what to do next.