Requiem for the Penny?

On February 9, 2025, at 8:27, Donald Trump posted (from his Super Bowl box?) that production of the U.S. penny coin will cease.

Can this really happen? And if so, can it work?

The penny, worth one cent, costs approximately 3.7 cents to mint. It’s estimated that there are approximately 240 billion pennies floating around out there ($2.4 billion dollars!), many of them in change jars, on your car floorboards, swimming around in the bottom of your purse, or buried in your couch cushions – in other words, not being put back into circulation. But retailers and other money handlers still make change and need pennies to do so – so they need to “buy” more pennies from their banks, which in turn need to obtain more pennies from the Mint. The U.S. Mint lost more than $85 million making pennies in 2024 – 3.7 cents at a time.

Tariffs and Trade Wars, and Taxes, Oh My!

Man your battle stations--it’s time for a trade war! If you’ve been following the news, it’s likely you have been bombarded with near constant updates about escalatory tariffs and the looming threat of trade wars as the new administration has been following up on its promise to impose tariffs of 10-60% of all U.S. imports. Within the first few weeks, we have seen the posturing with Mexico, Canada, and China. The Trump administration has now ordered 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel. But what are tariffs and how do they result in a trade war? And how might trade wars impact consumers, entrepreneurs and the economy?

The 2024 Paralympic Games

“I will not be participating at the Paralympics. I will be competing.”

-Hunter Woodhall, Paralympic Gold Medalist in the Men’s 400M T62 Category

The 2024 Paris Olympics were a highlight of this past summer, with 30.6 million viewers tuning in across all NBC platforms, making it the most-streamed Olympics. Among many other highlights, Noah Lyles (USA) and Letsile Tebogo (Botswana) battled it out for the title of World’s Fastest Man, Katie Ledecky’s (USA) swimming prowess made her the most-decorated female American Olympian across all sports, Yusuf Dikeҫ (Turkey) stunned viewers with his nonchalant silver medal shot, and Cindy Ngamba won the Refugee Olympic Team their first ever medal with a bronze in Women’s Middleweight Boxing. My favorite event this year, by far, was the men’s 1500M. Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse (USA) pulled off a huge upset and absolutely smoked Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen! Watch it here.

With all the excitement surrounding the Olympics this year, people were understandably disappointed when the Closing Ceremony wrapped up. A common sentiment I heard was, “Well, what do I do now?” I wanted to yell from the rooftops, “It’s not over yet!”

Is Your Business Ready for 2024 and the New Data Privacy Laws?

I have the perfect tool to get you started.

Our popular 2024 Legal Guide to Privacy and Data Security is now available. This guide is a collaborative effort between Lathrop GPM and the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). You can find a digital version here. You can also get an old school paper version by contacting me here.

The guide is written for non-lawyers and offers insight into a variety of privacy and data security related laws, the impact of such laws on businesses, and best practices to mitigate risks.

New GDPR Adequacy Decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework

According to the General Data Protection Act (GDPR), transfer of personal data to a country outside the EU can only take place where the recipient country ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights of EU data subjects.

Until recently, the European Commission had deemed the United States to have inadequate data privacy and security protections and required businesses to find legal mechanisms to allow for such cross border transfer of data. That has now changed. On July 10, 2023, the European Commission formally adopted a new adequacy decision on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The adoption of this adequacy decision follows years of intense negotiations between the EU and the U.S., after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield that had earlier been in place.

2023 Legal Guide to Privacy and Data Security

The 2023 Legal Guide to Privacy and Data Security is now available. This Guide is a collaborative effort between Lathrop GPM and the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). A digital version of the 2023 Legal Guide to Privacy and Data Security can be downloaded here.

The guide is written for non-lawyers and offers insight into a variety of privacy and data security-related laws, the impact of such laws on businesses, and best practices to mitigate risks.

We prepared the first version of this guide in 2014. Since then, DEED has published seven updated editions. The frequency of these updates is evidence of the ever-evolving legal landscape of data privacy and security.

New developments in 2023 include amendments to the Safeguards Rule of the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, which became effective October 27, 2022. These amendments expand the definition of financial institutions covered by the law and impose new burdensome requirements related to data security. Motor vehicle dealers and colleges are just two examples of non-banking “financial institutions” that now fit the expanded definition of so-called “finders” and are required to implement and maintain a comprehensive data security system that protects customer information.

WIPO Global Awards reward small and medium-sized enterprises making a global impact

In 2022, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched a new initiative to recognize the innovative efforts of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from around the world. WIPO’s new Global Awards are designed to identify new inventions and creative commercial solutions that impact economic, social, and cultural progress, and in turn, encourage innovation and the commercialization of IP assets.

WIPO is a self-funding agency of the United Nations (comprising 193 member states) that provides a global forum for IP services, policy, information, and cooperation. WIPO’s mission is to ensure a world where innovation and creativity from anywhere in the world is supported by IP rights for the good of everyone. An aim of the Global Awards is to recognize and support enterprises and individuals striving to make a positive impact through innovation both at home and beyond borders.

Is that the Real McCoy?

Counterfeit products are fake goods designed, packaged, and branded to look like the real thing. They were historically of a lesser quality. For many years, the counterfeit market was considered a problem primarily for manufacturers of well-known luxury or high-end consumer goods such as name-brand clothing, shoes, purses, shoes, watches, jewelry, and electronics.

The fake items were sold by street vendors to persons who might not be likely customers for the genuine products, so actual “lost sales” to the brand owner were questionable. In most of these situations, purchasers would have (or should have) a fairly good idea that they were not purchasing a genuine product, so lack of quality would not be a surprise or blamed on the brand owner.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming? Or Maybe the FTC

As we watch the televised Russian invasion of Ukraine with horrific destruction and casualties caused by missiles, tanks, and other conventional warfare, the hostilities may seem far away and distant. As Russia continues to suffer setbacks in their conventional military approach, we are likely to see cyberattacks that could spread beyond the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

In a meeting with business leaders on March 21, Joe Biden gave the following warning:

“This is a critical moment to accelerate our work to improve domestic cybersecurity and bolster our national resilience. I have previously warned about the potential that Russia could conduct malicious cyber activity against the United States, including as a response to the unprecedented economic costs we’ve imposed on Russia alongside our allies and partners. It’s part of Russia’s playbook. Today, my administration is reiterating those warnings based on evolving intelligence that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks…….

If you have not already done so, I urge our private sector partners to harden your cyber defenses, immediately implementing the best practices we have developed together over the last year. You have the power, the capacity, and the responsibility to strengthen the cybersecurity and resilience of the critical services and technologies on which Americans rely. We need everyone to do their part to meet one of the defining threats of our time — your vigilance and urgency today can prevent or mitigate attacks tomorrow.”

TSMC

About this time last year, I posted my top five favorite podcasts for entrepreneurs. Avid readers may remember that one podcast, Acquired, was far and away my favorite listen—and I am happy to report that after a year of searching, downloading, subscribing and un-subscribing, Acquired still remains a must-listen in my podcast rotation.

For those who do not remember (or did not heed my suggestion), each episode of Acquired examines the history of a different tech company and the founder(s) who built them. Most of the companies featured on Acquired are familiar (think Apple, Uber, Lyft), but every so often, the hosts, Ben and David, pull back the hood of a Company I have never heard of before—the most recent case being Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Are You Ready for a New Canadian Privacy Law?

As if we weren’t already confused by COPPA, CCPA, and CPRA, we may soon welcome CCPA as the newest addition to the “A-C-P” alphabet soup of data privacy laws.

Here is a primer to avoid confusion:

COPPA = Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 

CCPA = California Consumer Privacy Act

CPRA = California Privacy Rights Act 

CPPA = Consumer Privacy Protection Act 

On Nov. 17, 2020, Canada’s federal government introduced a bill to enact new legislation to strengthen data privacy protections for individuals. The proposed legislation, known as the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), would be the first major overhaul of Canada’s privacy laws since the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) became effective in April 2000. If passed, CPPA will provide data privacy rights to individuals similar to those afforded under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the CCPA, and CPRA. 

CPPA will bring significant changes to PIPEDA including:

Enhanced Individual Rights: The CPPA would expand the rights of Canadian consumers in relation to how organizations collect and process their data. Similar to GDPR, consumers will have the right to request deletion of their personal data and to withdraw consent for any further use of their information. Consumers will also have the right to request transfer of their data from one organization to another. Businesses will be required to transparently describe to individuals any use of an automated decision system — such as algorithms and artificial intelligence — to make predictions, recommendations, or decisions about individuals that could have a significant impact on them. Individuals will also have the right to request an explanation as to how information about them was obtained as well as how any prediction, recommendation, or decision was made by an automated decision-making system.  

Allen Kurzweil, Whipping Boy: The Forty-Year Search for my Twelve-Year-Old Bully (Harper Books, 2015).

Sometimes you pick up a book out of mild curiosity and discover that it’s a whole lot more interesting than you thought it would be.

I expected this book would be a middle-aged man’s reflections about his childhood, perhaps an exploration of how painful experiences had laid the foundation for the wisdom that comes with age. There is this angle, sure, but even more interesting is the story within the story. The bully with whom the author tries to reconnect turns out in later life to have become the shill for a fraudulent international financing scheme that preyed on entrepreneurs who could not find financing to underwrite their dreams. And thereby hangs a cautionary tale for all of us.

The book focuses on the activities of the Badische Trust Consortium, which held itself out to be a 150-year-old private bank based in Switzerland and run by a committee composed of “European aristocrats capable of underwriting loans from $10 million to $500 million.” The author’s nemesis, who did business as a representative of “Barclay Global Investments” (confusingly close to Barclays Global Investors, a legitimate investment banking firm), would lure victims into the scheme. Preliminary meetings would be arranged at the New York offices of a premier Park Avenue law firm, which was duped into lending credibility to the Trust’s operations.

Privacy Shield No More

Under EU privacy law, personal data can only be transferred to countries with adequate data protection. When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, adequate countries included only Andorra, Argentina, Canada (for commercial organizations), the Faroe Islands, Guernsey, Israel, Isle of Man, Jersey, New Zealand, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Japan. For those in countries without adequacy decisions, recipients of personal information must ensure they are sufficiently protecting data in other ways. The U.S. is not deemed adequate. However, organizations were able to confront this issue by self-certifying under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks designed by the European Commission, Swiss Administration, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. If an organization self-certified under the Privacy Shield and remained in compliance with its data protection requirements, then that organization would be deemed adequate to receive personal data from the EU and Switzerland. More than 5,000 U.S. organizations rely on the Privacy Shield to legitimize their international data transfers. 

Roger Scruton, Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (Bloomsbury, 2017).

No matter where you find yourself on the political spectrum, you can’t help but notice a certain isolationist trend sweeping across the globe. In our own country, there are tariffs, the wall, and stronger immigration controls. One might reasonably conclude that these policies can be traced, more or less, to this condition.

The United States is by no means the only nation affected. Many observers argue that reaction to the open-border policy dictated by its membership in the European Union lies behind the narrow referendum victory supporting the United Kingdom’s secession from that organization. This, of course, is an over-simplified view of the arguments supporting Brexit.

In fact, as the late Roger Scruton argues in Where We Are, the resentments arising out of the EEC’s open-border policy are merely a symptom of globalization, driven by advances in technology and the boundary-free nature of cyberspace. Cyberspace is “everywhere and nowhere,” a “world of constant information” connecting people to “networks rather than places.”  The internet, Scruton tells us, “is an unpoliced nowhere, a kind of Hobbesian state of nature in cyberspace . . . that cannot compete with the trustworthy somewhere for which all people yearn.”

For the entrepreneur, the direction of the global economy is clear: “In 2006 only one of the six most valuable companies in the Fortune 500 index was an information technology company; in 2016 only one was not such a company.” The unanswered question is whether the yearning for a homogenous “home” is an unavoidable byproduct of globalization and transformation to an information economy. 

Alastair Mactaggart Joins My Privacy Hall Of Fame

“I just think the data use by these companies is out of control”

--Alastair Mactaggart, California Real Estate Developer

Who is Alastair Mactaggart? He has done more than any other person to expand the privacy rights of individuals in the United States. In 2016, Mactaggart, who earned a fortune in Bay Area real estate, was talking with a Google employee about the amount of personal information collected by companies. This casual conversation led him to fund a citizens initiative that was set to appear on the November 2018 ballot in California. It would have given California residents extensive new rights to control how their data is collected and used by businesses. Following intensive lobbying by tech groups the ballot initiative was withdrawn by Mactaggart and in its place the California legislature (in less than a week) passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Effective January 1, 2020 the CCPA becomes the most extensive consumer privacy legislation ever passed in the United States. It gives Californians sweeping new data privacy rights, including a first-of-its-kind private right of action that will encourage lawsuits against businesses who fail to comply with the data breach portion of the CCPA. What a difference one person (with a lot of money) can make.

Musings of a Privacy Professional

My random hopes, fears, thoughts, predictions, advice, and personal observations on GDPR, CCPA, NSA, and other privacy and data security matters:

• Despite the intense lobbying efforts of tech companies and others, Congress — fearful of the California Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CCPA), which becomes effective January 1, 2020 — will not pass a new comprehensive federal privacy and data security law this year.
• Plaintiffs’ lawyers will start gearing up for the class action lawsuits they hope to bring under the CCPA. Lawyers who have already benefited enormously from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) private right of action for noncompliant text messages and robo calls will likely add this new lucrative specialty to their practices.
• Regarding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), fatigue has set in and, except for one large fine against Google, we have seen limited enforcement actions by the Europeans. Expect to see more actions against companies who have failed to comply with GDPR requirements regarding transparency, data breach, cross-border data transfer, and data access requests. It is never too late to consider a GDPR compliance review.

What does the new EU Copyright Law have to do with my small business? Perhaps more than you think…

On April 15, 2019, the European Council approved the “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market” — a major change to EU copyright law that was approved by the parliament of the European Union on March 26, 2019 with a vote of 348 yea, 274 nay, and 36 abstentions. The Directive’s next step will be publication in the Official Journal of the EU, after which member states will have two years to implement the Directive into their national laws.

What is the Directive and why might it matter for my small business?

The Directive is completely changing the copyright landscape in the EU – but given the global nature of the World Wide Web, it is likely to alter business practices around the world. 

The Directive’s greatest changes are to websites with user-generated content. Such websites include not only YouTube and Facebook, but also sites like Medium and blogs and commentary sites as well. If you have a website that contains user-generated content that touches the EU in any way, you may be responsible for making sure that content does not infringe copyright laws.

Over the last several months the Directive has been heavily criticized, particularly due to Articles 15 and 17 (formerly Articles 11 and 13), respectively the so-called “link tax” clause and “upload filter” clause. Prior to the vote by parliament, protestors took to the streets of Europe, cautioning that the Directive will “censor the internet.” Meanwhile, the author of the legislation and his supporters tout it as necessary to “protect and strengthen the rights of the creatives: authors, performers, singers, songwriters, journalists . . . all copyright-holders.”

Luck of the Irish?

It is March and St Patrick’s Day is just around the corner. My mother was proudly Irish — possibly full-blooded, although family lore has it that there might be a little French in the mix. With the DNA capabilities these days, I could maybe get some clarity, but part of me likes the mystery. 

My Irish ancestors were so poor that several left Ireland in the early 1800s, before the potato famine. Some came in through Canada because Canadian ship fares were often cheaper; others came through New York. They didn’t linger long on the East Coast, but got jobs building the canals and railroads going west. They were settled in Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota by the time the potato famine forced other family members to leave Ireland.

I remember events with my mother’s family, which at the time of my childhood still included grandparents and great uncles and aunts that were the first generation born in America. The gatherings were noisy and animated — a constant cacophony of “discussions” regarding current events, politics, and religion. In the midst of the din, it was not uncommon to witness a spontaneous recitation of some well-known poetry, or occasionally something more obscure or even original. It was a time for books to be recommended and shared. My uncle Johnny played the guitar and sang what songs were acceptable having spent 20+ years in the navy. The food was mediocre. 

What I don’t remember are conversations about business, industry, careers, or even work. In fact, I’m not really sure what most of my Irish relatives did for their livings. It simply wasn’t a topic of conversation. Was it because it didn’t matter or because they had no historical connection to "business?” Their families came to America with no money, education, or skills. They were looking for jobs — not business opportunities. The same persons that could quote Yeats or Wilde or Joyce never spoke of great Irish industrialists or inventors.

An American Buyer in Italy

This past week I had the extreme privilege of attending the 120th annual Fieracavalli (translation: Horse Fair) show in Verona, Italy. This is a massive exposition comprised of over 12 buildings, eight arenas, and seemingly endless outdoor exhibitor areas. There are a multitude of events going on simultaneously, from B2B vendor booths to public shopping to educational shows for school children to world class jumping competitions. It’s completely fantastic and overwhelming!

I was graciously invited to attend Fieracavalli by the Italian Trade Agency. They brought in a small group of buyers from the American equestrian industry in the hopes of building business relationships and increasing the Italian brand presence in our U.S. market. They took wonderful care of us, from the comfortable Lufthansa flights to the beautiful Hotel Giberti accommodations. They even surprised us with tickets to the historic 120th anniversary dinner, set in a courtyard and building where Mozart himself was rumored to play music in his youth, and they gave us VIP accommodations to the spectacular “Gala D’Oro,” or Golden Gala, with performances from some of the best equine acts in their country. As one of the few delegates treated to this magnificent display of hospitality, I feel compelled to share my amazing experience.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana

I’m going to depart from discussing my usual intellectual property and technology subjects and step on my colleague Dave Morehouse’s toes with discussion of a book. Actually three books—Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy.  

The first book, “Fall of Giants,” follows five interrelated families from Wales, England, Russia, Germany, and the U.S. as they experience social and political issues at the time of the First World War. The second book, “Winter of the World,” continues with these five groups through the rise of the Third Reich, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. The third and final book, “Edge of Eternity,” continues the families’ stories in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

I first read these books as they were published between 2011 and 2014. While I don’t often reread books, particularly when they are this voluminous, I was recently drawn to them for a second look. If you have read Follett, you are familiar with his creative and interesting use of fictional characters and occurrences to illustrate and explain actual historical events. But unlike dry historical narratives, he gives you a sense of the human side of why things happened. In my initial read, I found the human stories to be most compelling, but viewed them largely in their historical context—things that happened 100, 80, and 50 years ago. In my second reading, I am drawn to the broader backdrop and some striking relevance to current social and political behavior.