Electronic Financial Services

Perkins Coie was ranked #4 on the Top Law Firms for Patent Quality in Information Technology and #6 on the Top 20 All Industries list put on by Intellectual Asset Management magazine in accordance with Ocean Tomo PatentRatings. Ocean Tomo is a patent ratings company that specializes in assigning value to intellectual patents.

Mobile donations are not new.  But the unprecedented success of recent mobile fundraising efforts, such as the Red Cross Haiti earthquake mobile fundraising campaign that raised over $32 million, has increased activity and interest in all aspects of mobile donations - including security.
Perkins Coie Partner Dax Hansen published an article this week in Security Magazine's electronic newsletter that addresses this topic.

Perkins Coie Partner Dax Hansen was quoted this week in an article published by Internet Retailer, "Changing Their Stripes." The article discusses initiatives recently launched by Visa and MasterCard Worldwide in response to an increase in e-commerce and the rise of online competitors like PayPal and Facebook Credits. One example is MasterCard's Open APIs, which according to the article "is designed to make it easier for mobile and web developers to integrate MasterCard payments into their applications." The author quoted Hansen as saying this "appears aimed at developers looking for ways to sell games, music and other digital content to mobile consumers." "Developers are looking for flexible, easy solutions that don't require customers to input their card numbers," Hansen says.

As a service to its partners, clients and friends, Perkins Coie client Live Gamer invited lawyers Dax Hansen, Kirk Soderquist and Ron Koo to present a webinar last month on the legal issues impacting electronic stored value systems and related IP-ownership matters.

The mobile commerce industry is rapidly expanding. New commerce business models are being developed and their number is increasing. In this article published by E-Finance & Payments Law & Policy, Perkins Coie attorneys Dax Hansen and Matthew Senechal offer one approach to organizing and classifying the many different mobile commerce business models, assess the legal issues applicable to particular business models and summarize some of the core and emerging US legal issues applicable to mobile commerce solutions.

Two articles written by Perkins Coie attorneys  Dax Hansen, Kirk Soderquist and Andrew Grant were recently published in the Security Strategies Alert column in NetworkWorld. The articles, "Real legal issues with virtual currencies" and "Legal risks with virtual currencies in online games" provide a legal perspective on the increasing use of virtual currencies in online role-playing games and virtual worlds.

To address a perceived gap in regulatory treatment of increasingly popular virtual currencies, including Bitcoin, the U.S. Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) released new guidance on March 18, 2013.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts recently held that collecting a consumer's ZIP code at the point of sale may violate Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 93, Section 105(a) (Section 105(a)), which restricts the ability of retailers to collect personal identification information (PII) from consumers in connection with a credit card transaction.

The California Supreme Court recently issued a landmark ruling in Apple Inc. v. Superior Court (formerly Krescent v. Apple Inc. in trial court proceedings), a case with wide-reaching implications for consumer privacy in e-commerce. The issue before the Court was whether California’s Song-Beverly Credit Card Act (the Act), which generally prohibits retailers from collecting or requesting personal identification information (PII) as a condition of accepting credit card payments, should apply to online retailers.

Companies that accept online credit card payments should be keeping an ear very close to the ground for the California Supreme Court’s decision in Apple v. Superior Court (Krescent), expected within the next few weeks.  Depending on how the court rules, the case has the potential to spawn a flood of class actions against online retailers and change the way web payments are processed.

Mobile point-of-sale payment terminals have experienced explosive growth over the past year.  Unlike a traditional point-of-sale terminal, a mobile terminal communicates wirelessly when processing payment cards.  There are different types of solutions in the market, but one popular type is an application within a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet, that uses a hardware attachment to swipe payment cards. 

On August 21, 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York held that poker is a game of skill and thus running a poker game or business is not subject to federal prosecution under the federal Illegal Gambling Business Act ("IGBA").  Following on the heels of the Justice Department's September 20, 2011 ruling that the Wire Act (which prohibits using wire-line communications to place or receive bets) only applied to sports betting, last week's ruling may be another step toward legalizing online poker.