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.
Recovering a Hijacked Domain Name: A Practical Guide
This guide takes the owner of a hijacked domain name from the first hour after discovery to a recovered, locked name, and shows registrars, downstream buyers, and accused developers what to do when the demand arrives. It starts with the decision points that shape the response: how the name was taken, whether it has left the original registrar, whether the owner has a trademark, and whether the person who took it can be identified. The core steps cover containment of the root accounts, evidence preservation, notifications to insurers and law enforcement, registrar-to-registrar recovery through the Transfer Emergency Action Contact and the Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy, the UDRP, the in rem action and temporary restraining order in the registry's district, John Doe and in personam claims, insider disputes, and buy-backs through escrow. A timeline and cost table, a worked example that follows an industrial supplier through each step, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the guide.
Privacy Compliance Program Checklist: A Practical Checklist
A privacy compliance program is the operating system that keeps a company on the right side of an exploding patchwork of data-protection laws. This checklist builds one from the ground up, in order: governance and a named accountable owner, data mapping, the legal-patchwork analysis (FTC Section 5, CCPA/CPRA, the growing state laws, GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, COPPA), anchoring to the NIST Privacy Framework and the Fair Information Practice Principles, a prioritized roadmap, and the operational machinery—privacy notices, DSAR handling, vendor and DPA management, DPIAs and privacy by design, security and breach response, training, and retention. It closes with accountability: documentation, monitoring, and audit. Each phase pairs checkboxes with the WHY and the traps, plus common mistakes, primary authority, and related mclaw.io resources. Build to the strictest applicable standard and apply it broadly. This is a map, not legal advice.
Running a Law Firm on Open Source Technology: Embracing Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness
This is the deep business case for running a law firm on open source software—the efficiency and cost-effectiveness argument, worked through in numbers and weighed honestly against its limits. It explains what open source is and how the GPL, LGPL, AGPL, MIT, Apache, and BSD license families differ, then maps a complete open source stack covering the operating system, collaboration, documents, email, accounting, research, and security. It develops a rigorous total-cost-of-ownership comparison against proprietary suites, including a worked numeric hypothetical, and treats vendor lock-in and data portability as both a financial and an ethical concern. The article overlays the professional-responsibility framework that governs every technology decision a lawyer makes—ABA Model Rule 1.1 comment 8 on technology competence, Rule 1.6(c) on safeguarding client confidences, the cloud and SaaS ethics opinions, ABA Formal Opinion 483 on breach response, and the patchwork of state breach-notification and emerging written-information-security-program laws. It closes with a phased migration roadmap and a candid accounting of open source's real limits. For the shorter action checklist, see the companion guide Open Source for the Law Firm; for the licensing law itself, see Open Source Software.
Vulnerability Disclosure Toolkit: VDP Policies, Safe Harbor Terms, Researcher Agreements, and Response Letters
This toolkit collects the documents a company and its researchers need to run a vulnerability disclosure program and to handle the hard reports, each introduced by its purpose, its owner, and when to use it, with fill-in placeholders and drafting commentary tied to the governing authority. The templates include a public vulnerability disclosure policy, a standalone safe harbor clause, a security.txt file, a researcher reward and release agreement, a neutral acknowledgment letter, a request for more detail, a reward decision letter, a disclosure timeline and coordination agreement, an internal triage and notification memo, and a response letter for a message that reads like extortion. A running example involving a fictional logistics software company shows each document in use. The toolkit is built to be used with the program checklist and the step-by-step guide in the same set, and it flags where counsel, insurer consent, and sanctions screening are required.
Stolen Domain Names: How Domain Hijacking Happens and the Legal Paths to Getting One Back
A stolen domain name is a theft problem first and a trademark problem second, and the remedies that work depend on how the name was taken and where it went. This article explains the common hijacking methods, from registrar account takeover and SIM swaps to lapsed registrant email domains and developers who registered the client's name in their own account, and separates registration hijacking from DNS hijacking. It then walks through the recovery paths in the order they usually matter: the registrars and the ICANN Transfer Policy, the registrar-only Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy, the UDRP and its limits, the in rem action under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, state-law conversion following Kremen v. Cohen, and federal computer-crime and stored-communications claims. It tells the key cases as stories, flags open questions such as how the re-registration split applies to thieves, and gives each side practical guidance. An extended worked example, common mistakes, an FAQ, and takeaways close the article.
Troubled Technology Project Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist tracks a troubled software implementation from the first missed milestone through recovery, notice and cure, termination, transition, and claim preparation. It is written for in-house counsel, outside counsel, and project executives on both the customer and the vendor side, with vendor-specific items flagged throughout. Each phase lists specific, actionable tasks tied to the governing contract provisions and legal authority, including UCC adequate assurance, material breach standards, deemed acceptance, copyright ownership of custom code, preservation duties under Rule 37(e), and arbitration rules. Red-flag boxes identify the moments when a project problem becomes a legal problem. A deadlines table, a list of common failure points, and a short worked example involving a hospital system's revenue-cycle software rollout show how the phases fit together.
Social Media Account Ownership and Impersonation Response Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist turns the law of social media account ownership and impersonation into tasks a business, its counsel, and the people on the other side of a dispute can check off. It starts with the ownership foundation: an account inventory, company-controlled credentials and business portfolios, a written ownership policy that respects employee password-privacy laws and the NLRA, and account clauses in employment, agency, and influencer agreements. It then covers onboarding and offboarding, first-hour triage of any incident, and separate response phases for hacked accounts, accounts held by insiders or agencies, impersonation, squatted handles, and platform suspensions. A litigation-readiness phase covers the demand letter and the injunction record, and a defense phase covers the employee, creator, agency, or parody account on the receiving end. Red-flag boxes, a deadlines table, common failure points, and a short worked example close the checklist.
CAN-SPAM Email Marketing Compliance Checklist: A Practical Checklist
The CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7701-7713) and the FTC's rule (16 C.F.R. Part 316) do not ban unsolicited commercial email; they impose a disclosure-and-opt-out code of conduct on every commercial message, bulk or single, B2B or B2C. This checklist operationalizes that code: classify each message under the primary-purpose test, keep headers and subject lines honest, label commercial mail as an ad, include a valid physical postal address, provide a one-step opt-out kept live for 30 days, honor opt-outs within 10 business days forever, never sell or transfer opt-out addresses, and maintain and scrub a central suppression list. It allocates sender/initiator liability (no contract can transfer it away), handles affiliate marketing and special content, and layers in the TCPA for texts and GDPR/CASL for international recipients. Each phase pairs checkboxes with the WHY and the traps, plus common mistakes, primary authority, and related mclaw.io resources. Verify the current per-email penalty at the FTC's latest adjustment notice.
Navigating the Legal Landscape of Agile Software Development
Agile and Scrum development build software in short iterative cycles instead of against a fixed, up-front specification, and that single change breaks most of the assumptions baked into a traditional fixed-scope, fixed-price software contract. This article explains, for lawyers and non-lawyers alike, why fixed-scope contracting clashes with iterative development and how to structure Agile agreements instead, using time-and-materials, capped T&M, and sprint-based statements of work tied to a product backlog and a contractually defined product owner. It covers the doctrinal backdrop (substantial performance, UCC acceptance and perfect tender, failure of essential purpose), acceptance criteria and the "definition of done," change management without formal change orders, intellectual property ownership under the work-made-for-hire doctrine of 17 U.S.C. 101 versus written assignment and implied license, open-source and third-party compliance, warranties and limitation of liability, data security and privacy, the special problems of Agile in regulated and government settings, performance metrics and service levels, emerging frontiers such as AI-assisted development and smart-contract automation, and practical dispute-avoidance strategies. It also situates Scrum among its sibling frameworks—Kanban, Extreme Programming, and Lean—and the scaled approaches used on multi-vendor programs. Worked contract scenarios with invented parties, and sample clause language, illustrate each issue. The goal is a contract as adaptive as the methodology it governs while still protecting both customer and developer.
Education Law for Schools and Edtech: FERPA, Title IX, and Section 504
Schools and the companies that sell to them operate under a set of statutes that were written decades apart, overlap unevenly, and are enforced by agencies with very different tools. A district can be simultaneously a FERPA-covered educational agency, a Title IX recipient, a Section 504 and IDEA obligor, a state actor subject to the First and Fourth Amendments, and a customer whose vendor contracts determine whether it has just disclosed student data unlawfully. This article works through each regime in the order it usually arises: what FERPA protects and how the school official exception makes most edtech lawful, how COPPA and state student privacy statutes reach vendors directly, what Title IX now requires procedurally, how Section 504 and the IDEA differ, and where constitutional limits constrain discipline, speech, and searches. It closes with the constitutional limits on discipline, speech, and searches that apply to public schools as state actors and to no one else.
Consumer Health Data Toolkit: Consent Forms, Data Maps, and Breach Notification Decisions
This toolkit collects the working papers for a consumer health data program. It includes an applicability matrix, a HIPAA status worksheet, a data map template with a filled-in row, a traffic capture script, consumer health data privacy policy clauses, consent and sale authorization language, vendor contract clauses, a Health Breach Notification Rule decision tree with a decision memo and notice letter, consumer rights procedures and scripts, a geofence decision matrix, and a legal process intake sheet. Each tool states its purpose, owner, and timing, and each is followed by drafting notes tied to the governing authority. Bracketed text needs your facts. Every sentence that makes a factual claim has to be checked against what your systems actually do.
Software Licensing Agreements: An Overview
A software license is permission to use code you do not own, and that one legal choice—license, not sale—quietly organizes a multi-trillion-dollar industry. This high-level overview explains the big ideas behind software licensing rather than walking clause by clause: why copyright (17 U.S.C. 106 and 117) makes running a program an act that needs permission, why the first-sale doctrine pushed the whole industry from selling to licensing, and how Vernor v. Autodesk decides when a "sale" is really a license. It offers mental models for reading any software contract, surveys the four licensing worlds (perpetual, subscription, SaaS, and open source), explains how courts decide whether a clickwrap or browsewrap deal even formed (ProCD, Specht, Nguyen, Meyer), and maps the lifecycle of a license from grant to exit. Throughout, it points you to mclaw.io's deeper drafting, review, and transaction resources for the clause-level detail. The aim is a clear conceptual map a founder, an in-house lawyer, a judge, or a curious non-lawyer can all follow. This is general information, not legal advice.