Laws and Regulations

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires certain businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities. That applies to physical spaces, but also to online spaces. And failure to create an ADA-compliant website could open a business to lawsuits, financial liabilities and damage to your brand reputation...

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that will require the state's garment factories to pay a minimum hourly wage in addition to giving workers other benefits. The Garment Worker Protection Act is designed to help ensure workers are paid properly and create a safer working environment, but opponents of the law believe it could lead to job losses...

Merch by Amazon, the tech giant’s print-on-demand merchandise platform that, among other things, allows approved artists to upload their own designs, has a scam problem. The platform has reportedly become rife with scammers downloading other people’s designs and selling them as their own work...

Shenendehowa High School athletic director Chris Culnan received two boxes of promotional T-shirts with the instructions to throw them into the crowd at football games and read the names of local businesses who sponsored the shirts. Culnan, however, had no idea the shirts were coming. He didn’t order them...

The North Face is suing a Raleigh-based T-shirt seller doing business as "The Trap Face" for trademark infringement. Besides similarities in the font and colors, the biggest problem for The North Face is that, in this instance, “trap” refers to the practice of selling illegal drugs...

The University of North Carolina has partnered with The Brandr Group to facilitate student-athletes’ branding efforts. According to Forbes, The Brandr Group will “develop licensing opportunities on behalf of the student-athletes in apparel and non-apparel categories, and other co-branded sponsorships.”...

A U.S. Supreme Court decision is bringing the idea of college athletes being able to profit from their name, image and likeness closer to reality. That could present new business opportunities for branded merchandise companies, though the rules—and the path forward—are still fairly unclear...

Using phrases like “Olympic,” “Olympiad,” “Paralympic,” “Pan-American,” or just about anything related to the U.S. presence at the Olympics creates a risk of infringing on the Olympics' intellectual property. There are some obvious ones, but some are less obvious. For example...

Alaska Airlines’ uniform allows for transgender employees to wear uniforms that conform to their gender identity, and includes different pieces to assemble a uniform outfit. But each set is given the “male” or “female” binary, and employees cannot mix a “female” piece with a “male” outfit, such as a scarf or tie...

On the heels of last week’s House action on postal reform, the Senate this week got into the game by introducing companion legislation.