Intellectual Property Law

Act Now: Less Than Three Months to Rein in PATRIOT and Restore JUSTICE!

Posted on March 07, 2011

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Law That Removes Works from the Public Domain

Posted on March 07, 2011
Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear an important case about whether Congress has the power to "restore" copyright protection to works that already exist in the public domain. To be clear, for more than 200 years the law has been settled ? once a work was in the public domain, there it remained, and downstream users could feel free to use, store, or share it any way they saw fit...

China Deputizes Smart Phones to Spy on Beijing Residents? Real-Time Location

Posted on March 06, 2011
The Chinese government has announced plans to track the real-time location of all cell phones in the city of Beijing, purportedly to ease traffic problems that have plagued the city. Human rights activists have expressed concerns that this plan may well be the newest attempt by the Chinese government to surveil its citizenry against any attempted uprising...

Supreme Court Case Could Jeopardize Medical Record Privacy

Posted on March 02, 2011
Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday to focus on the privacy issues at stake in a battle over the sale and data mining of medical records, urging justices to reverse a ruling that could jeopardize patient privacy...

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Could 2011 Be The Year? A Look at the 2011 Patent Reform Act

Posted on March 02, 2011
It's starting to look like 2011 could be the year that Congress finally passes patent reform legislation. This week, the full Senate begins debate on the Patent Reform Act of 2011, a bill that is receiving a lot of press, mostly for its funding and first-to-file provisions...

Supreme Court Backs Government Transparency Over Corporate Privacy Claims

Posted on March 02, 2011
In a powerful ruling for government transparency and accountability, the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday rejected so-called "privacy" protections for corporate entities under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). EFF and a coalition of other groups filed an amicus brief in this case urging just this result, arguing that a new definition of "corporate privacy" would lead to broad swaths of previously public records becoming hidden from view...

Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases

Posted on February 24, 2011
These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed ?John Does? in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants...

New Honorees in the Takedown Hall of Shame

Posted on February 24, 2011
Co-authored by Eva Galperin and Abigail Phillips Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Takedown Hall of Shame collects the worst of the worst. Today, we welcome two new additions to our gallery of villains...

Riding the Fences of the ?Urban Homestead?: Trademark Complaints and Misinformation Lead to Improper Takedowns

Posted on February 21, 2011
A leading candidate has emerged for the next EFF Takedown Hall of Shame induction: the Dervaes Institute, which is claiming broad ownership rights over the term ?urban homesteading? -- a term commonly used to describe a social movement dedicated to achieving more self-sufficient, sustainable living in cities...

What does the "Track" in "Do Not Track" mean?

Posted on February 19, 2011
There is a lot of discussion about Do Not Track at the moment. The FTC has announced support for the idea; Mozilla has added a Do Not Track header option into Firefox betas, and Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a Do Not Track bill. Other proposed privacy legislation, such as Rep...

Pt II: EFF Evaluates the FCC?s Net Neutrality Rules in its ?Report and Order?

Posted on February 18, 2011
In Part I of this post, we looked at the FCC?s stated basis for its authority to regulate the Internet in its Report and Order, issued in late December 2010. Now, we turn to the substance of the FCC?s Order, and specifically how the Order stacks up against the concerns we raised in our January, 2010, comments to the FCC about the FCC?s October 2009 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM)...

Newly Released Documents Detail FBI?s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws

Posted on February 17, 2011
EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI?s "Going Dark" program, an initiative to increase the FBI's authority in response to problems the FBI says it's having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies...

EFF Argues for Privacy in Hearing Over Twitter Records

Posted on February 16, 2011
EFF, the ACLU, and others were in court Tuesday to try to block government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection to its WikiLeaks investigation. We also asked the judge to reveal whether any other companies had received similar orders from the government...

Don't Mess With Texas Continued: Thousands of Defendants Severed

Posted on February 16, 2011
When we said that Texas was no place to file suit if you want to bypass due process, we weren't kidding. Senior federal judge Royal Furgeson has "severed" thousands of Does in these and several other cases. (see below for sample order). Judge Furgeson is the same judge that ordered the plaintiffs in five cases to explain why the court should not appoint attorneys to represent the Does' interests...

Will the Rise of Wikileaks Competitors Make Whistleblowing Resistant to Censorship?

Posted on February 16, 2011
Since it began publishing a trove of classified United States Embassy cables on November 28, 2010, Wikileaks has faced an onslaught of censorship that demonstrated how online speech is vulnerable when intermediaries refuse to host contentious or unpopular speech...

EFF Appoints Jonathan Zittrain to the Board of Directors

Posted on February 16, 2011
EFF is extremely pleased to announce a new addition to our Board of Directors: Harvard Law and Computer Science Professor Jonathan Zittrain. For many of you, Jonathan does not need an introduction, as he is one of the true luminaries of Internet scholarship...

Trial of Independent Media Pioneer Chiranuch Premchaiporn Begins in Thailand

Posted on February 16, 2011
We and many other Internet freedom advocates have been closely watching the prosecution of Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the director of a popular alternative Thai news portal. Chiranuch, also known by her online handle Jiew, is being charged for defamation of the Thai royal family, or lèse majesté, under a particularly disquieting set of conditions...

Debate Over Internet Backdoors Heats Up in Congress and in Court

Posted on February 16, 2011
Two hearings tomorrow?one in court and one in Congress?will highlight the brewing debate over whether Congress should expand federal surveillance laws to force Internet communications service providers like Facebook, Google and Skype to build technical backdoors into their systems to enable government wiretapping...

ICE Seizures Raising New Speech Concerns

Posted on February 16, 2011
As legislators in DC contemplate expanding government copyright enforcement powers, there's new reason to worry that government agents are misusing the Internet policing powers they already have -- with disastrous consequences for thousands of innocent bystanders...

Don't Mess With Texas: Another Texas Judge Scrutinizes Mass Copyright Litigation

Posted on February 15, 2011
Looks like the Texas courts are no place to file suit if you want to bypass due process. A few weeks ago, we reported that Mick Haig Productions had dismissed its copyright infringement lawsuit against 670 "John Does," complaining that the court's appointment of attorneys from EFF and Public Citizen had impeded its ability to prosecute its case...

What Congress Can Learn from the Recent ICE Seizures

Posted on February 15, 2011
?COICA?, Senator Leahy?s Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act, is back. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the legislation tomorrow morning. As a reminder, COICA would give the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, most notably the ability to meddle with the Internet?s domain name system (DNS) and make entire websites effectively disappear, along with noninfringing content and lawful speech...

Secretary Clinton Unveils New Funding for Activism Technology, Rhetorical Refresh in Internet Freedom Speech

Posted on February 15, 2011
Earlier today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a speech about Internet freedom titled, "Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges In A Networked World." In her remarks, Clinton built on prior statements about the U.S. Government's commitment to a free and open Internet, responding in part to the uprisings in the Middle East and Cablegate — major, ongoing international developments adding to the swell of debate about the parameters of Internet freedom...

House Rubber-Stamps PATRIOT Act Renewal, Don't Let The Senate Do The Same!

Posted on February 14, 2011
Despite the valiant efforts of liberty-defending congresspersons from both political parties, the House of Representatives has just this evening passed an extension of the three USA PATRIOT Act surveillance powers that were set to "sunset" at the end of February, by a vote of 275 to 144...

Privacy in the Wake of Olympic Security: Wikileaks Sheds Light on How U.S. Pressured on Brazil

Posted on February 13, 2011
Privacy advocates have observed for years that countries hosting the Olympic Games introduce increasingly heightened security and surveillance measures for the event, but rarely cut back on public surveillance after the games are finished. Because these expanded surveillance measures are often made permanent, we noted with interest a report released by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks that detailed how the United States lobbied Brazil about security and information-sharing strategies after the latter was chosen to host the 2016 Olympic Games...

What?s Better than an ?Internet Kill Switch?? Regular Security Updates

Posted on February 13, 2011
The US government is deliberating about how to approach the ?cyber? security problem. But the solution the government needs to network security isn?t sweeping authority over the Internet ? it?s common-sense security practices they?ve heretofore failed to implement...

Privacy in the Wake of Olympic Security: Wikileaks Sheds Light on How the U.S. Pressured Brazil

Posted on February 13, 2011
Privacy advocates have observed for years that countries hosting the Olympic Games introduce increasingly heightened security and surveillance measures for the event, but rarely cut back on public surveillance after the games are finished. Because these expanded surveillance measures are often made permanent, we noted with interest a report released by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks that detailed how the United States lobbied Brazil about security and information-sharing strategies after the latter was chosen to host the 2016 Olympic Games...

DMCA Copyright Policies: Staying in the Safe Harbors While Protecting Your Users

Posted on February 11, 2011
One of the less-heralded issues in a series of prominent cases (here, here, and here, for example) testing the limits of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") safe harbor provisions is the question of when and how service providers must terminate the accounts of "repeat infringers...

EFF to Judge: Watch for Fairness in Mass Copyright Suits

Posted on February 08, 2011
One of the major problems with the mass copyright lawsuits we seen over the last year is that the judges hearing the cases often aren?t aware of the full legal and practical context of the litigation. That?s because they are asked to make important decisions (e...

Egypt's Internet Blackout Highlights Danger of Weak Links, Usefulness of Quick Links

Posted on February 08, 2011
In response to ongoing protests, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ordered a shutdown of all Internet access for five whole days, from January 28 to February 2, but social media and news continued to flow in and out of the country thanks to a group of protagonists dedicated to supporting the flow of information...

Bi-Partisan Alliance Beats Back PATRIOT Act Sneak Attack in House Vote

Posted on February 08, 2011
Today in the U.S. House of Representatives, an unlikely alliance of House Democrats and Republicans stood up for civil liberties and successfully beat back a fast-track attempt to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act without the much-needed checks and balances EFF has championed...

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