Special Report

3 Questions

Craig S. Horbus works in a variety of areas for Witschey Witschey & Firestine Co. LPA, including e-business and technology. Horbus works with Internet and technology businesses to advise them on the evolving and emerging legal issues in the technological world. His e-business transactional work includes drafting privacy policies, terms and conditions of use, linking, marketing, compliance, licensing, and data and software agreements.

Q. What should businesses be thinking about, in terms of technology law, that they might not be thinking about now?

You need to know who your digital partners are. For instance, some of these affiliate marketing companies that are out there may outsource your marketing campaign to a freelancer and you may never know. Are they following the CAN-SPAM Act? Are they illegally spamming without your knowledge? The freelance marketers and writers only care about money. If they can make a splash by kind of bending the rules of canned spam or by borrowing content from a competitor and then get out quickly, they will.

Q. What technology law developments might be in store for businesses this year?

The Cybersecurity (Enhancement) Act (H.R. 4061) is one area of regulation that’s in the pipeline. It’s a bill that’s designed to ensure the free flow of commerce within the U.S. and its global trading partners through secure cyber communications. It helps to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications to help develop some of these information technology specialists to improve and maintain against security disruptions. It’s kind of a philosophical act, but it could have some teeth in it as far as companies following certain protocols to help ensure the security of the Web and intranet communications.

Q. What can businesses do to ensure they are in compliance and following all of the regulations?

One of the biggest things they can do is either have the right people in place or bring in the right people to review everything. The ability to be prepared — to keep up with the risk assessment, with the collaborations, with monitoring developments — is a big thing. You need to have somebody in-house who is doing these day-to-day risk assessments on internal and external areas of privacy.