Technology and Intellectual Property

In August, California’s Attorney General announced a settlement with Sephora that carried a $1.2 million dollar fine for Sephora’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) violations. This is the first CCPA action taken by California that resulted in a fine and settlement. It is important to understand what the California Attorney General alleged Sephora did in violation of the CCPA, so…

On July 7, 2021, Colorado’s Governor, Jared Polis, signed the Colorado Privacy Act (“CPA”) into law.  Colorado is the third U.S. state to enact a comprehensive privacy law, following the previous enactment of the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) and the Virginia Data Privacy Act (“CDPA”). Though the CPA will not become effective until July 2023, it is critical for businesses to evaluate their current privacy frameworks, and whether they will be sufficient to meet the extended requirements under the CPA.

Welcome to the second edition of Cover Your SaaS, your new favorite(ish) semi-regular publication from HMB Legal Counsel’s State & Local Tax team. Far from accepting a sophomore slump, this edition boldly delves into SALT developments in the digital products sphere, the importance of separately stating charges, and the dangers of straying into taxable telecommunications.

Welcome to the first edition of Cover Your SaaS, a new semi-regular publication from HMB Legal Counsel’s State & Local Tax team. Using the latest in news-scanning technology, i.e., the daily emails that land in our inbox, our goal is to keep you updated on key SALT developments in the digital and cloud computing space.

As 2020 kicks off, cybersecurity remains ever present in the news whether its predictions for cyberattacks in conflict between state actors, such as the United States and Iran, or the recent New York Times report regarding a possible hack at the Ukrainian gas company at the heart of the impeachment investigations.

In a prior post, I explained the basics of the Chicago Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax (“Transaction Tax”), including the applicability of the tax to tangible personal property and software, potentially applicable exemptions and exclusions from the tax, and collection issues. This follow-up post in the Practitioner Series further clarifies the application of the Transaction Tax to “cloud” software products and explores the interplay with the Illinois Retailers’ Occupation Tax (“ROT”).

It was not so long ago that in the cyberspace realm businesses only needed to worry about having a good firewall and spam filter to prevent fraud. Now, as technology has advanced so have the fraudsters and the government is warning businesses, especially those conducting business with foreign suppliers and/or businesses, of a new and escalating scam called the Business Email Compromise, the BEC.

HMB would like to congratulate Parkonect, a cloud-born, mobile-first parking technology company delivering Parking Access and Revenue Control, and its CEO Harlan Karp and the Parkonect team on a successful sale to FLASH, a leader in flexible technology solutions for urban real estate. Parkonect helps properties by facilitating connectivity and mobility in parking assets via real-time intelligence and digital commerce…

The Supreme Court’s decision effectively means that a company can utilize devices that automate calls and texts, as long as that device cannot use a random or sequential number generator to either store or produce the telephone number.

In this second of a three-part series, Breslow discusses the Internet Tax Freedom Act and whether the digital world has really been protected from the tax man. Adoption and Intent of the ITFA Initially adopted in 1998 under the Clinton administration with the mantra “no new internet taxes,” the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) was made permanent on February 24,…

5/20/20 12:30PM CST CPE Pending Recent state cases like Ex Parte Russell County Community Hospital and Citrix Systems are just the tip of the iceberg as states audit taxpayers in a digital economy. Chris and Samantha will provide an update on recent cases and legislation in this area and, more importantly, will describe their experiences with taxpayers as they attempt…

4/29/2020 12:30PM CST CPE Pending The intent of the Internet Tax Freedom Act was to protect electronic commerce from the taxman, but has it succeeded? This webinar will focus on recent pending cases (Labell v. City of Chicago and Apple, Inc. v. City of Chicago) involving ITFA claims and proposed legislation (Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax) that potentially implicates ITFA.…

Read the full article on Tax Notes here (subscription required). Samantha Breslow discusses how the sluggishness of legislation does not often adjust itself to the speed and terminology of technology. However, there are a few states that are adapting to overcome the discrepancies. Download a PDF of the full article here. Debugging the (State Tax) Code: Outdated Sales Tax Terminology…

The original case was brought in California federal district court in 2017 by a company (hiQ) trying to protect its business of using publicly posted user data on LinkedIn. The California federal district court awarded a temporary restraining order against LinkedIn. This order allowed hiQ to keep scraping data off of LinkedIn’s platform on employees in connection with one of…

Auditors in Chicago have been aggressively asserting that businesses have tax duties under the "cloud computing tax" because of their economic presence, or the volume of business they conduct within the city. In an article by Bloomberg Law News titled "State of Wayfair: Economic Thresholds Sneak Into Chicago Audits" by Michael J. Bologna, Samantha Breslow explains that the problem is…

Business Email Compromise ("BEC") is a scam perpetrated by cyber criminals to attack businesses that first began to be tracked and reported by the FBI in 2013. BEC typically consists of phony or phishing emails that appear to originate from a company executive or member of a company's accounting or finance department containing fraudulent payment instructions with the objective to…