Intellectual Property Law

House Oversight Committee Investigates DHS FOIA Review Practices?EFF's Requests Were Singled Out

Posted on March 31, 2011
Tomorrow the House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing titled, ?Why Isn't the Department of Homeland Security Meeting the President?s Standard on FOIA?? As we wrote last October, redacted DHS emails revealed the agency was targeting certain Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and certain FOIA requesters?such as activist groups, watchdog organizations, and journalists?for an extra layer of review by politically-appointed officials within and outside the agency...

EFF to Council of Europe: Ensure privacy, transparency, and freedom of expression in search engines

Posted on March 31, 2011
This week the Council of Europe's expert committee on new media (MC-NM) met in Strasbourg to examine the comments received on the draft recommendation and proposal for guidelines for search engines. In written comments, EFF urged the Council of Europe to revise its recommendation and guidelines to ensure that they promote transparency on search records requests, protect privacy vis-à-vis the government, and preserve freedom of expression rights, including readers? rights to read information online...

Documents Obtained by EFF Reveal FBI Patriot Act Abuses

Posted on March 31, 2011
In yesterday's Senate Judiciary Hearing, "Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," FBI Director Robert Mueller testified about the Bureau's desire to extend three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act -- PATRIOT Section 215, authorizing secret court orders for the Internet and financial records of innocent Americans; the "lone wolf" wiretapping provision, which unconstitutionally allows foreign intelligence investigators to bypass traditional wiretapping protections and spy on people inside the U...

"Operation in Our Sites" Moves Ahead

Posted on March 31, 2011
The numbers confirm the anecdotal evidence: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is stepping up intellectual property–related enforcement, launching almost half as many cases in the past two months as it had in total in 2010...

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Reader Privacy Act Introduced to Upgrade Book Privacy for the Digital Era

Posted on March 30, 2011
Sacramento, CA - California Senator Leland Yee has introduced the Reader Privacy Act of 2011 (SB 602), with backing from the California Affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The law would bring a much-needed upgrade to match Californians' reading habits...

Judge Stays Discovery in OpenMind v Does

Posted on March 30, 2011
As we?ve been reporting for some time, a series of lawsuits has been filed across the U.S. against thousands of individuals accused of having illegally uploaded and downloaded copyrighted works in violation of copyright law. One of the latest of those suits is a case called OpenMind Solutions v...

April 5: Call the White House to Demand PATRIOT Act Reform

Posted on March 30, 2011
Tell Obama: Keep Your Promises and Demand PATRIOT Act Reform! 202-456-1111 On April 5, 1792, President George Washington vetoed a bill the first time in U.S. history that the presidential veto was exercised. On the anniversary of this day, we're calling on Barack Obama to exercise his presidential powers to veto any PATRIOT Act renewal bill that does not include powerful reforms to safeguard civil liberties...

Mobile Carrier Delays Harm Internet Security

Posted on March 29, 2011
By delaying or even blocking security updates for mobile devices, mobile carriers put their users, their business, and the country?s critical infrastructure at unnecessary risk. Mobile security problems plague the entire software stack ? the baseband, the kernel, the application frameworks, and the applications ? and carriers continue to resist shipping regular and frequent updates...

What Location Tracking Looks Like

Posted on March 29, 2011
Your cell phone company knows everywhere you go, twenty-four hours a day, every day. How concrete is this fact for you? It's very concrete for Malte Spitz, a German politician and privacy advocate. He used German privacy law — which, like the law of many European countries, gives individuals a right to see what private companies know about them — to force his cell phone carrier to reveal what it knew about him...

Where?s EFF? Why EFF Is Sometimes Quiet About Important Cases

Posted on March 28, 2011
When legal issues light up the Internet, people turn to EFF for answers.  Whether it's attacks on coders' rights, overreaching copyright claims online, or governments' efforts to censor or spy on people, we are often among the first to hear about troubling events online, and we're frequently the first place people turn to for legal help...

Another New Study Shows That Filesharing Doesn?t Deter Artists From Making Music

Posted on March 28, 2011
Further proof that the recording industry?s oft-repeated claims of the downfall of the entire music industry hold no water: a new report finding that filesharing has led directly to "reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of independent labels...

Microsoft Shuts off HTTPS in Hotmail for Over a Dozen Countries

Posted on March 25, 2011
Microsoft appears to have turned off the always-use-HTTPS option in Hotmail for users in more than a dozen countries, including Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan...

It?s Time for the Recording Industry to Stop Blaming "Piracy" and Start Finding A New Way

Posted on March 25, 2011
As many — EFF included — have been saying for years, filesharing is not the reason that the recording industry has fallen on hard financial times. In fact, the recording industry?s complaints that the sky is falling really only apply to the recording industry, and not musicians and the fans, who have seen increased music purchases, increased artist salaries, and the availability of more music than ever before...

ACLU and EFF Appeal Ruling In Case Challenging Government Attempt To Obtain Private Data in WikiLeaks Investigation

Posted on March 25, 2011
Alexandria, VA - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today appealed a ruling that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation related to WikiLeaks...

Iranian hackers obtain fraudulent HTTPS certificates: How close to a Web security meltdown did we get?

Posted on March 23, 2011
On March 15th, an HTTPS/TLS Certificate Authority (CA) was tricked into issuing fraudulent certificates that posed a dire risk to Internet security. Based on currently available information, the incident got close to — but was not quite — an Internet-wide security meltdown...

Good and Bad in Google Book Search Settlement Decision

Posted on March 23, 2011
Yesterday?s decision rejecting the proposed settlement in the Google Books case, Authors Guild v. Google, got a number of things right. For starters, as we wrote shortly after the decision was announced, we?re glad that the court acknowledged the importance of the privacy concerns we helped to raise...

Fair Use For the Win in Righthaven Case

Posted on March 22, 2011
Last Friday, a judge in the Nevada federal district court patiently explained why fair use disposes of Righthaven's copyright claim arising from the republication of an entire news article by a nonprofit organization. The hearing was in one of the now-250 Righthaven copyright cases...

Google Books Decision: "The Privacy Concerns are Real"

Posted on March 22, 2011
A federal district court in New York today issued a long-awaited ruling in the Google Books case, Authors Guild v. Google, rejecting the proposed settlement between the parties. EFF participated in the case as counsel to a collection of authors and publishers, including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Cory Doctorow, who objected to the settlement based on concerns about reader privacy...

In-District Meetings: an Offline Tool for Defending Your Online Rights

Posted on March 21, 2011
In the EFF Action Center, we provide you tools to defend online civil liberties. But if you really want to make a difference, one of the best things you can do is have an in-district meeting with your Congressional representative. In fact, Congress is on recess this week and again at the end of April...

An Introduction to the Federated Social Network

Posted on March 21, 2011
Lately, EFF's work to protect rights and liberties in the online world has focused rather heavily on social networking sites and their policies. The logic is borne out by the numbers — Facebook and Twitter combined claim hundreds of millions of worldwide users, so advocating for stronger privacy and less censorship from these kinds of websites will mean a better Internet for lots and lots of people...

EFF Lets the Sun Shine In

Posted on March 16, 2011
This week marks the seventh annual Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. As our little way to celebrate, EFF has recently posted nearly nine thousand pages of government documents to our site...

EFF Urges Judge to Reject Dangerous New Copyright Troll Strategy

Posted on March 16, 2011
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked an Illinois judge to quash subpoenas issued in a "reverse class action" lawsuit accusing thousands of people of illegally downloading pornography, and urged the court to dismiss the case...

Tracking Protection Lists: A privacy enhancing technology that complements Do Not Track

Posted on March 16, 2011
Yesterday, Microsoft released version 9 of Internet Explorer, which includes two significant new privacy features: Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs) and a Do Not Track (DNT) header that allows users to request that websites not track them. We've written about the virtues of the Do Not Track header previously...

A Privacy Emergency: Consumer Rights at Risk in Next Generation 911

Posted on March 15, 2011
The federal government is working on revamping America's 911 service, with a project called Next Generation 911. The goal is to create a framework that will allow consumers to contact critically important emergency services through multiple means — including text message, photos, and email — in order to improve responsiveness and accessibility...

EFF Seeks Cooperating FOIA Reviewers

Posted on March 15, 2011
Are you an EFF member or supporter interested in helping out on EFF's Freedom of Information Act cases and connecting with EFF's FOIA attorneys? Are you looking for ways to volunteer with EFF but perhaps don't live near our offices? EFF is setting up an email list to connect you to the important work we do to ensure government accountability...

Spend an Evening with the EFF Activism Team Discussing Privacy and Government Surveillance

Posted on March 15, 2011
On the evening on March 24, 2011, EFF staff activists will discuss the state of government surveillance and privacy in the United States at "Government Surveillance in a Digital World," an event hosted by San Francisco Intersection for the Arts, with a live video stream by BAMM...

Sunshine Week: Do Open Government Laws Still Matter in the Era of WikiLeaks?

Posted on March 14, 2011
March 14-18, 2011 is 'Sunshine Week'—a week to focus on the importance of open government and how we can ensure accountability for our leaders at the federal, state and local levels. In the year since Sunshine Week 2010, the world of open government has been rocked by the WikiLeaks leaks...

Court Rules Against Privacy in Battle Over Twitter Records

Posted on March 11, 2011
Alexandria, VA - A federal magistrate judge in Virginia ruled today that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation related to WikiLeaks, and that those users and the public can be prevented from seeing some of the documents that the government submitted to the court to justify obtaining their records...

Have You Benefited from Public Access to PubMed?

Posted on March 11, 2011
April 7, 2011 marks the third anniversary of a groundbreaking policy that has dramatically improved access to a trove of medical and scientific knowledge. Whenever the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates taxpayer money for scientific research, the much-heralded NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the fruits of that research are made freely available to the same taxpayers that funded it...

Don't Let TPP Become the Next ACTA: Contact Your Lawmakers and Demand Transparency!

Posted on March 09, 2011

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