Mobile and Tech News

Here is some fascinating legal and technology news coming out of New York City: In Eastern Monroe County, lawmakers also are recommending a law to ban reading, composing, or sending a text message while you are driving. Apparently this law is being pushed aggressively and has become a sort of personal issue ever since 5 Fairport High School students suffered fatal injury in a tragic auto accident recently. In this particular accident it was determined that the mobilr phone belonging to the driver had sent and received messages just prior to the fatal injury in question. Incidentially if you happen to live in New York City and you need a superlative New York City personal injury attorney then you should take a look at highly respected the Law Offices of Geller & Siegal as they are some of the leading New York City personal injury attorney working today, in my humble opinion..

Legislators believe that the bans will primarily benefit the younger drivers who have less driving experience and who are statistically much more likely to be involved ina crash and suffer fatal personal injury from text messaging while driving their vehicle. Of course, there is some question marks as to just how enforceable the laws on the books will turn out to be since texting is not as obvious as talking on a cell phone is. Obviously a good attorney might try to argue that the driver was fiddling with his personal beverage holder, for example.

New York State in general and new York City in particular was the first place to ban mobile phone use while driving. Even though a Zogby Poll discovered that more than sixty percent of young people send text messages while driving their vehicles, there is little in the way of other data on texting and driving, perhaps because few drivers, especially in the City, want to admit what they were doing just before an accident. It is difficult for authorities to prove since phone companies are not obliged to release these particular records, although an aggressive District attorney might try to demand them in certain cases, potentially.

Prior to New York State passing the seatbelt law, only 17 percent of drivers thought it was a good habit to wear a seatbelt, while 89 percent now believe in the practice. Lawmakers may have an easier time passing legislation in the wake of the widely reported commuter train crash in Los Angeles, recently, in which an engineer was suspected to have been “texting” and running a stop signal. Twenty-five people died, and many more suffered personal injury. Federal officials are investigating the crash.

The emergence of e-commerce and the reliance upon the internet as a means of conducting business has opened the door to new risks which the insurance market is seeking to accommodate. Clearly, the Y2K problem did not cause a global apocalypse. Nevertheless, recent events have shown that the use of malicious code and/or attacks on commercial websites pose significant
and continuing risks to businesses that rely on, or are expanding into, e-commerce. On the one hand, some commentators believe that existing forms of property and liability insurance will adequately address such risks. However, it is doubtful whether Y2K remediation costs are covered by traditional forms of property insur¬ance. The Y2K insurance cases will undoubtedly serve as a proving ground for such arguments. By the way if you live in the Orange County area and are in need of a leading Orange County insurance litigation attorney then I suggest Todd Picker as he is simply one of the best Orange County insurance litigation attorney out there currently.
As noted above, many of the first-party prop¬erty exposures are largely intangible. The harm caused by computer hackers and/or malicious code does not implicate damage to tangible prop¬erty in the ordinary sense. Not surprisingly, the market place is responding to these new risks with the introduction of specially tailored insurance programmes designed to address the risks associated with doing business electronically. Newer policy forms are being introduced to cover losses arising from extortion, theft of money, com¬puters, destruction of data and software by virus attacks or other malicious code, business interruption stemming from hacker attacks, denial of website service because of tampering; and virus clean-up. While the outcome of pending law¬suits cannot be readily predicted, in the final analysis the marketplace will fill over time whatever gaps may exist in traditional property insurance forms.