New Law Permits French Employees to Ignore Late-Night Work Emails

French employees now have the right to ignore work-related emails outside working hours after a new law became effective on January 1, 2017.

From the Washington Post:

The new employment law requires French companies with more than 50 employees to begin drawing up policies with their workers about limiting work-related technology usage outside the office, the newspaper reported.

The motivation behind the legislation is to stem work-related stress that increasingly leaks into people's personal time — and hopefully prevent employee burnout, French officials said.

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash, like a dog,” Benoit Hamon, Socialist member of Parliament and former French education minister, told the BBC in May. “The texts, the messages, the emails: They colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.

The "right to disconnect" law is part of a series of reforms designed to relax France's employment regulations.

Protecting Your Trademark Overseas

A federal trademark registration with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) is limited to protection within the United States. Outside of the country, similar marks are not automatically preempted without an additional filing (and even if they are, may be burdensome to enforce). You might be surprised to stumble across, for example, an Applebee’s restaurant near Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London or an Old Navy café not far from Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens.

However, registering your trademark internationally is not as burdensome as it may seem. The Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks (Madrid Protocol) is an international treaty that allows a trademark owner to seek registration from any of the 96 parties with a single application. Instead of requiring individual applications in the language of each country where an applicant desires protection, the Madrid Protocol allows the applicant to file a single international registration through the United States Patent and Trademark Office. An international application may be filed electronically using the Trademark Electronic Application System for International Applications.

While every applicant may not need international protection, it may be wise to consider international registration if you anticipate using your mark overseas or know of potentially infringing marks. More information on the Madrid Protocol and international applications is available from the USPTO.

German Labor Ministry Bans After-Hours Employee Contact

In a previous post, we examined whether employees could owe overtime pay to non-exempt employees who use their company smartphones after normal working hours and how employers should establish clear policies governing smartphone usage.

In Germany, this need for clarity was highlighted when the country’s labor ministry recently banned managers from contacting employers after-hours except in case of emergency. . Under the guidelines, employees are not to be penalized for failing to check voicemails after hours and should only be contacted if the matter cannot wait until the next workday. Other German employers, including BMW and Volkswagen, have also established policies to limit after-hours contact. The policy comes in the wake of an apparent suicide by a Swiss telecom executive who had admitted the constant use of his smartphone caused him extreme stress.

While these guidelines were established to protect the “mental health” of employees rather than to avoid overtime pay, the principle is the same. Employers and employees both benefit when clear policies are established and communicated.

The Curious Case of Edward Snowden

Although our firm does not typically practice in the area of international law, one of our attorneys recently published a guest blog post with the North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation analyzing the international legal issues raised by the case of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked classified national security documents earlier this year.

During the summer of 2013, the world was captivated by the story of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Currently living in Moscow on a temporary grant of asylum, Snowden has charged the Obama Administration with two related violations of international law: (1) that it interfered with his right to seek asylum; and (2) that by revoking his passport, it had made him stateless. 

Read the entire blog post courtesy of the North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation.