My mission is to strengthen your business, ensure compliance with privacy laws, HIPAA, AI laws, and protect you while enabling you to contract with vendors and new customers. My main areas of practice are technology law, intellectual property law, and business law. I can help you grow your business, including guiding you through negotiations with business partners and vendors, advising you on how to protect your brand and trade secrets, and keeping you up to date on the latest privacy and cyber security requirements.
My goal is to help you identify your current and future needs, and to address issues that you may not have anticipated yet. I’ll listen to your challenges, concerns and ideas, provide honest advice, keep an open flow of communication, and be a strong, determined advocate for your interests.
I am licensed in Pennsylvania and am admitted to practice in all three Federal districts within the Commonwealth. My experience includes jury and non-jury trials, Pennsylvania Superior Court briefs and argument, and litigating and mediating cases in Federal court. Past areas of practice have included family law and criminal law. A more detailed biography is located here.
About Wilftek LLC
I am a Senior Attorney with Wilftek LLC, a technology and intellectual property firm based in the Philadelphia area which represents clients at various stages of their business development – from the initial spark of an idea, to building relationships with business partners and customers, to planning for strategic growth. We help clients protect their business, brand, and creative assets.
My mission is to strengthen your business, ensure compliance with privacy laws, HIPAA, AI laws, and protect you while enabling you to contract with vendors and new customers. My main areas of practice are technology law, intellectual property law, and business law. I can help you grow your business, including guiding you through negotiations with business partners and vendors, advising you on how to protect your brand and trade secrets, and keeping you up to date on the latest privacy and cyber security requirements.
My goal is to help you identify your current and future needs, and to address issues that you may not have anticipated yet. I’ll listen to your challenges, concerns and ideas, provide honest advice, keep an open flow of communication, and be a strong, determined advocate for your interests.
I am licensed in Pennsylvania and am admitted to practice in all three Federal districts within the Commonwealth. My experience includes jury and non-jury trials, Pennsylvania Superior Court briefs and argument, and litigating and mediating cases in Federal court. Past areas of practice have included family law and criminal law. A more detailed biography is located here.
About Wilftek LLC
I am a Senior Attorney with Wilftek LLC, a technology and intellectual property firm based in the Philadelphia area which represents clients at various stages of their business development – from the initial spark of an idea, to building relationships with business partners and customers, to planning for strategic growth. We help clients protect their business, brand, and creative assets.
Contact Us For a Free Consultation
For a free legal consultation, call 610-544-8922 now, or use the form below.
Areas of Practice
Intellectual Property Law
Experienced in copyright, trademark, licensing, trade secret protection strategy, contract, and other areas of Intellectual Property law. Each area has its unique requirements. We can protect an owner’s rights, and protect a business’ ability to leverage and protect intellectual property rights.
Compliance, Cybersecurity, and Business Law
Businesses must comply with an increasing number of laws focused on protecting the privacy and security of customers, employees, and business partners. Insurance companies have successfully used non-compliance as a reason to not cover costly insurance claims. Hope is not a legal strategy – find out what your compliance requirements are, and whether you are meeting those requirements. We can set up or review your business structure and your employee and vendor agreements, to ensure that they meet your current and future needs.
Articles
Copyright Law Doesn’t “Heart” New York
Why is the famous "I [heart] New York" logo protected by trademark and not copyright? At first glance, you'd think that it's artwork, and therefore can be protected by copyright. However, the Copyright Act protects "original works of authorship." The "I [heart] New York" logo is simply the phrase "I love New York", with the word "love" replaced by a red heart. As the Supreme Court held in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service [...Read More...]
Post a Photograph to Social Media and License it to the World?
Authors, beware! The next time you post your work on social media, you may lose significant ownership rights. A core principle of U.S. copyright law is that the author controls how their work is used, and can earn money from that use if they wish. But what happens when a photographer posts her work on Instagram and a large corporation uses it without compensating the photographer? This is exactly what happened to Stephanie Sinclair, a [...Read More...]
During coronavirus, Pennsylvania issues first ethics opinion for lawyers working remotely
Pennsylvania has long been a leader in ensuring that its lawyers can use technology responsibly and ethically. The 2011 Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) opinion on cloud computing was among the first of its kind across the country, preceding the American Bar Association (ABA)'s efforts by six years. Today, the PBA distributed its April 10, 2020 opinion on "Ethical Obligations for Lawyers Working Remotely". In this Formal Opinion 2020-300, it cites its 2011 cloud computing opinion [...Read More...]
Force Majeure Clauses and the Coronavirus Pandemic
A month ago, we were at work and school. Grocery stores were full of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, flour, and milk. “Flattening the curve” meant that I needed to lose a few pounds. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has now swept through the United States like a hurricane. Businesses have been shuttered, supply chains are stretched or broken, and employees are required to work at home – if they haven’t been laid off completely. During this [...Read More...]
Have DMCA Takedowns Gone Rogue?
In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law. That year, Chumbawamba's "Tubthumping" topped the charts, Mark McGwire broke the home run record, Google, Inc. was formed, and smartphones didn't yet exist. The Web was in its infancy, but online service providers were concerned about their potential liability for hosting users' content. The DMCA added a new section 512 to the Copyright Act, limiting the liability for online service providers who hosted unmodified user content, adopted [...Read More...]
Google v. Oracle – the Supreme Court’s copyright case of the decade?
Photo by Mr. Kjetil Ree. [CC BY-SA] Newsweek has called it the "copyright case of the decade" and they may be right. Google and Oracle are software titans battling over whether the freely available connections between software platforms (Application Programming Interfaces, or "APIs") can be protected by copyright law. What's an API? APIs are bits of software code which enable developers to quickly and easily build programs that integrate with a specific platform or [...Read More...]
The KosherSwitch Patent: Protecting malfunction by design
Here's a challenge for these modern times: How do observant Jews follow the Biblical commandment to observe the Sabbath? Rabbis generally agree that driving is prohibited, and that using electricity is not prohibited - but using switches to manually turn the flow of electricity on or off is prohibited. This is why you may have seen refrigerators or ovens with a "Sabbath mode", which prevents certain functions from working on the Sabbath. By contrast, light [...Read More...]
No, You Can’t Trademark “OK Boomer”
You may have heard that the generational battle between "milennials" and "baby boomers" now has a catch phrase: "OK Boomer". It's a dismissive phrase by those darn youngsters who are loitering on your lawn and forgetting to pull up their pants. I'm kidding about the loitering and the pants, but the catchphrase is a real thing, and it's also become a meme. If you don't know what a meme is, then chances are that you're [...Read More...]
Confused about privacy compliance?
The European Union’s GDPR and California’s CCPA aren’t the new kids on the block anymore.
In just a few years, 19 states passed comprehensive data privacy laws, all of which will be in effect by January 1, 2026.
Did you know: the criteria for whether a state’s privacy law applies to your business varies widely between the states. It depends on the type of business, type of data, number of consumers affected, and other factors.
GDPR
Recognized as the privacy standard outside the U.S., used as a template for other countries' privacy lawsGDPR
The E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in 2018, and remains the leading privacy standard.California's CCPA
Recognized as the leading state privacy law in the U.S. - but 18 states have taken a different approachCCPA
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is the leading privacy standard for the U.S., though it only applies to California residents.The CCPA has protections on selling and sharing data, and is enforced by a new agency: the CPPA (no, not a typo!)