El Salvador has recently become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as Legal Tender. This is a first step in a long way towards crypto currencies gaining legal acceptance around the world. Bitcoin is now being accepted at El Salvador Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut and some other establishments. While some people may claim this is a massive game changer, and it may be considered a watershed moment, the average person in El Salvador may not have easy access to Bitcoin so its possible it may take months or even years before the average person in El Salvador actually uses crypto to make a fa ..read more

The Tokyo Olympics will be the first Olympics where Olympians who want to attend college or who are attending college won’t have to choose between accepting a college scholarship and earning money from sponsors based on their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and not cashing in on their new found fame. This is a huge turning point in the history of college athletics which I believe will lead to increased revenues for college athletic departments and student-athletes. The Washington Post has a great article discussing how Olympians in the past have had to choose between accepting a college schola ..read more

Who has the right to sell an NFT of the artwork for an album? This is a question that may soon be decided due to a lawsuit over who has the right to sell an NFT based upon Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt album. There appears to be some controversy over whether the NFT is just for the original artwork of the album or whether the NFT also includes an ownership percentage in Roc-A-Fella records. Damon Dash owns 1/3rd of Roc-A-Fella records and Dash may be trying to sell his 1/3rd ownership rights in the company along with his 1/3rd rights to the album’s NFT. Unfortunately, the alleged facts in the lawsu ..read more

Plaintiffs are suing Google claiming that its Google Photos service uses facial recognition technology that violates the Illinois biometric privacy law. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and it claims that Google has failed to obtain consent as required under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The law requires companies that collect and store Illinois residents’ unique identifiers such as iris scans, fingerprints, and face prints to provide details on how they store and protect the sensitive information. The statute carries da ..read more

In a very troubling development and potential violation of Title IX, the University of Montana is requiring female students who visit fraternity parties to have their University IDs scanned so the school can track who is attending a particular fraternity party. The school is collecting a student’s University ID number, the date and time of scanning and keeping the data for a minimum of seven years. This is very troubling and appears to be against the law since the University of Montana is a public research school and as such the government has no business collecting the names of people who ..read more

As long as a country is governed by a communist regime such as China or a dictatorship such as Russia, I don’t recommend using their cyber services (e.g. TikTok, Kaspersky, etc.) because of the potential for these services to be abused by their governments. For awhile I have been trying to get members of Congress to agree with my position and finally multiple members of the U.S. Congress are listening to my pleas. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Tom Cotton jointly sent a formal request to intelligence officials to investigate the possible counterintelligence risks posed by ..read more

In a comical yet troubling new twist, China is now banning people from visiting their country who like South Park Tweets that satirize their government. According to CNBC, Superstar German DJ Zedd was recently banned for just liking a South Park Tweet. Liking a Tweet doesn’t necessarily mean you actually like a Tweet. It may also mean that it interests you and that you want to review it later or that it reminds you have something to avoid. I like a lot of Tweets not because I actually agree with the content but because I use it as a teachable moment for my clients and students. If this ..read more

China’s communist dictatorship recently stopped working with the Houston Rockets on basketball related projects because the Rocket’s general manager Daryl Morey tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” The tweet was subsequently deleted but China was already angry. If Daryl Morey wanted to call China out on Twitter without any consequences he should have created a FINSTA account (the type I specialize in creating for clients) that would have made it extremely difficult if not impossible to tie back to him. He shouldn’t follow former 76er’s GM, Bryan Colangelo social media lead ..read more

In a very troubling ruling, the European Union’s top court has ruled that Facebook must remove content that one European Court has ruled illegal, world wide. My hope is that Facebook disregards this ruling because this is judicial overreach based on flawed legal analysis. Why? Because free speech content that is illegal in an EE country may be legal in the United States so people in the United States should not be harmed because the EU doesn’t have the same free speech protections as the United States. Courts in Russia and China may now feel its legally justified to make similar rulings ..read more

The new California Fair Pay Act will enable student-athletes to finally monetize their social media assets while they are in college. Every other member of the college community has the ability to make money off of their YouTube channel or Instagram account so why can’t student-athletes? Because the NCAA said they can’t. There is no logical explanation other than the NCAA wants to hog all of the potential revenue streams for their own pockets. For example, former UCF kicker Donald De La Haye was forced to choose between a full D1 scholarship to play football or being able to control his d ..read more