E-Commerce Law Week, Issue 592

Connecticut AG the First to File HIPAA Suit

Connecticut Attorney General (and senatorial candidate) Richard Blumenthal has become the first state attorney general to file a complaint for violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  State attorneys general were granted the authority to enforce HIPAA by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which amended HIPAA as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Blumenthal has sued Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., and affiliated and successor companies in federal court in Connecticut after a portable computer disk drive holding the protected health information and other personal information of 1.5 million customers disappeared from the company's Connecticut office.  Blumenthal has also alleged that Health Net violated Connecticut’s breach notification law by delaying notification of affected individuals for six months.  Blumenthal is seeking injunctive relief and damages. 

Also in Connecticut ... Supreme Court Finds No Private Right of Action For Violations of Connecticut Electronic Monitoring Law

Connecticut General Statute § 31-48d requires employers that engage in electronic monitoring to "give prior written notice to employees."  But the Connecticut Supreme Court has held that this statute does not afford a private right of action to redress violations.  The city of Bridgeport disciplined two fire inspectors for “improper job performance” after reviewing information collected by GPS tracking devices installed on their city-owned vehicles.  The fire inspectors had not been told about the tracking devices or that they were being surveilled, and they sued the city and the fire chief for injunctive relief and damages.  The Connecticut Supreme Court did not decide whether the statute was violated; even though the plaintiffs were clearly "within the class of persons who were intended to be protected by the statute," there was no “indication, express or implied, of the legislature’s intent to create” a private right of action.  The statute provides only for civil penalties to be levied by the Labor Commissioner.  Moreover, the court said, if the legislature "had intended to provide the private remedy of a civil cause of action for enforcement," it could easily have added language explicitly indicating that such an action was "authorized and intended," just as it had done for other statutory provisions regulating employment. 

French Court Finds That Google Books Infringes Copyright in France

Last month, in Editions du Seuil, et al., v. Google Inc., the Paris Court of First Instance ruled that Google’s digital book project infringed the copyrights of French books, and ordered Google to remove posted excerpts of French titles and to pay €300,000 ($428,535) in damages and interest to two publishers of the French group La Martinière.  This decision followed a ruling by a federal district court in New York in The Authors Guild, et al., v. Google, Inc., refusing to reconsider its preliminary approval of the class action settlement agreement between Google and the representative Authors Guild.

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