Specialist news and analysis on legal risk and regulation

US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s plans to investigate potential anticompetitive coordination over “diversity, equity and inclusion” metrics has raised questions about what such an inquiry... (more story)

US state lawmakers are taking aim at the use of pricing algorithms, whether they’re used for “surveillance pricing” to charge people different prices for goods like groceries or airline tickets, or to orchestr... (more story)

MLex Summary: Clemens Food Group’s $7.75 million settlement with commercial and institutional purchasers of pork has been granted preliminary approval by a US federal judge to resolve price-fixing claims.

Brazil’s Patent and Trademark Office this week unveiled a new path to registration for generic or descriptive trademarks which would ordinarily be vulnerable to rejection. In a notice published in its Official... (more story)

In the software industry, where IP rights frequently change hands, language matters. That much was evident yesterday when the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Cloanto Corporation lacks standing t... (more story)

Angela Mills Wade of the European Publishers Council has warned that weak AI rules and vague transparency requirements risk undermining the development of a functioning licensing market between right holders a... (more story)

MLex Summary: The Office of the US Trade Representative has asked Mexico to review whether workers at the Tubos de Acero de Mexico, S.A. (TAMSA) facility are being denied the right to freedom of association an... (more story)

The European Union’s trade surplus with the US grew over the 12-month period ending in April despite ongoing trade tensions and tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, the Eurostat agency said today.

EU officials are considering splitting the EU-Mercosur partnership agreement's political and trade components to ease and speed up the ratification process for the latter part, MLex has learned. A similar move... (more story)

MLex Summary: Google is paying “lip service” to its discovery obligations by “slow-rolling” the production of remedy feasibility submissions to the European Commission and “continuing to withhold relevant, non... (more story)

A pool of eleven school district and personal injury lawsuits filed against the biggest social media companies including Meta Platforms, Google and ByteDance have been selected for trial in a large-scale US li... (more story)

Google today publicly backed the EU’s “risk-based” approach to online age verification, including development of an EU-wide system and child-protection guidelines for online platforms covered by the Digital Se... (more story)