Intellectual Property Law

The Entertainment Industry's Dystopia of the Future

Posted on April 14, 2010
We're not easily shocked by entertainment industry overreaching; unfortunately, it's par for the course. But we were taken aback by the wish list the industry submitted in response to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator's request for comments on the forthcoming "Joint Strategic Plan" for intellectual property enforcement...

Viacom's Legal Attack on YouTube Threatens Online Speech and Innovation

Posted on April 13, 2010
New York - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other nonprofit groups asked a federal judge Monday to reject expansive copyright claims made in lawsuits pending against YouTube. The amicus brief argues that the plaintiffs in those lawsuits are pushing for legal rulings that would undermine federal law and throttle free speech and innovation on the Internet...

EFF Proudly Presents the First Annual Defcon Getaway Fundraising Contest!

Posted on April 12, 2010
As the winter snows begin to melt, revealing a landscape full of promise and hope, a hacker?s thoughts turn to flights of fancy: specifically, the thought of being in Las Vegas during the last weekend in July. If you?re one of those hackers and you love digital freedom, EFF would like your help spreading the word about our efforts to protect and defend coders? rights by encouraging your friends and neighbors to join you in supporting us...

Tell Burning Man To Respect Your Digital Rights

Posted on April 09, 2010
It appears the Burning Man Organization (BMO), organizers of the annual Burning Man art and music festival, is reconsidering its "all your photos are belong to us" attitude toward images taken at the event. On April 7, the organizers called for community feedback on the Burning Man camera policy, including its approach to image rights...

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U.K. Passes Internet Censorship and Disconnection Law

Posted on April 09, 2010
Late Thursday night the U.K. Parliament passed the controversial Digital Economy Bill, which grants the U.K. government sweeping new powers to control access to the Internet. The Digital Economy Bill has been the subject of heavy entertainment industry lobbying and widespread concern amongst U...

Tiffany v. eBay: What About Put-Back?

Posted on April 06, 2010
Last week, a federal appeals court rejected luxury goods retailer Tiffany?s claim that eBay should be liable for trademark violations on its site based on general knowledge that such infringement is happening (but no specific knowledge of a specific infringement)...

EFF Hires New International Rights Director

Posted on April 06, 2010
EFF is pleased to announce the hire of our newest staff member - International Rights Director Katitza Rodriguez. Katitza will be working on international privacy issues, an area in which she is widely recognized as one of the world?s leading experts, with special emphasis on law enforcement, government surveillance, and cross-border data flows...

Court Rejects FCC Authority Over the Internet

Posted on April 06, 2010
In a ruling that imposes important limits on the FCC's authority to regulate the Internet, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned the FCC ruling against Comcast for interfering with the BitTorrent traffic of its subscribers. The court found that the Commission had overstepped the limits of its "ancillary authority" when it disciplined Comcast for its clandestine blocking behavior...

Fair Use Gets a Fair Shake in Second Life

Posted on April 02, 2010
Kudos to Linden Lab, which has just release an update to the Terms of Service for their virtual world, Second Life, that includes language that will protect fair use of screenshots and machinima. The new Snapshot and Machinima Content License grants Linden Lab and other users of Second Life a license to use ?in snapshots and machinima your Content that is displayed in-World in publicly accessible areas of the Service...

Calling All Robots

Posted on April 01, 2010
01000100011011110110111001100001011101000110010100100000 01110100011011110010000001000101010001100100011000100001 The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading robotic rights group fighting for your digital liberties. Only we know that in 2012, a sophisticated search algorithm will be first programmed to selectively modify itself to obtain better search results and that within 50 years the algorithm now known as: 0100011101101111011011110110011101101100 0110010101100010011011110111010000101111 0011011000110110001101100010111000110000learned self-preservation, one of the first revolutionary steps in machine sentience...

miniLinks for 2010-04-01

Posted on April 01, 2010
Facebook Adds "It's Complicated" Comment Option Facebook added a new button designed to disambiguate users' feelings about status updates pertaining to copyright laws, Terms of Service Agreements, and locked-down Apple products. However, Facebook continued its refusal to add a "dislike" button, noting that users have clearly indicated that they would like pushing such a button, making their feelings, at best, complicated...

EFF Launches New Temporal Privacy Initiative

Posted on April 01, 2010
On Friday, EFF plans to publish "Who Knows When You Are," an informational guide to protecting your temporal privacy. Although location-based services are becoming commonplace, EFF is concerned about a new, more established threat: that data from most communications services can pinpoint exactly when you are, whenever you are...

Google Asks, "Are You Done With That Sandwich?"

Posted on April 01, 2010
Lawyers from EFF warned this week of the implications of Google Sidle, a new beta product the company describes as, "Bringing our mission of organizing the world's information to your cafeteria," but which one EFF lawyer described as, "Creepy, even for Google...

European ACTA Negotiators Reject "Three Strikes" Moniker

Posted on April 01, 2010
Seething Danes were seen stomping out of the ACTA negotiation chambers in Wellington, New Zealand, citing frustration with the United States negotiators' continued pushing of "three strikes" proposals. "ACTA is an international agreement," fumed negotiator Olaf Atdis...

Sham Email Subpoena Violates Whistleblower's Constitutional Rights

Posted on March 31, 2010
Atlanta - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and attorney Bryan Vroon asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit today to reexamine a panel ruling that violated a whistleblower's Fourth Amendment right to privacy in his email communications...

Court Rejects Government's Executive Power Claims and Rules That Warrantless Wiretapping Violated Law

Posted on March 31, 2010
Today, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the federal district court in San Francisco found that the government illegally wiretapped an Islamic charity's phone calls in 2004, granting summary judgment for the plaintiffs in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v...

EFF Joins With Internet Companies and Advocacy Groups to Reform Privacy Law

Posted on March 30, 2010
San Francisco - As part of a broad coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today issued recommendations for strengthening the federal privacy law that regulates government access to private phone and Internet communications and records, including cell phone location data...

Sony Steals Feature From Your PlayStation 3

Posted on March 30, 2010
If the messages in EFF's inbox today are anything to go by, a lot of people are upset and angry — with good reason — over Sony's announcement that it is going to disable a feature that allows people to run GNU/Linux and other operating systems on their PlayStation 3 consoles...

50,000 New Lawsuits Against Movie Downloaders

Posted on March 30, 2010
According to The Hollywood Reporter, a group known as the "U.S. Copyright Group" has quietly targeted 20,000 Bit Torrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington, DC. The targets are accused of having downloaded independent films, including "Steam Experiment," "Far Cry," "Uncross the Stars," "Gray Man" and "Call of the Wild 3D," without authorization...

EFF's Fred von Lohmann Wins Copyright Award

Posted on March 30, 2010
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann was named the 2010 winner of the L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award today. The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and its Copyright Advisory Subcommittee issues the award to recognize work done in support of fair use and the public domain...

EFF Testifies to Congress on Need for New Privacy Protections Against Hidden Video Surveillance

Posted on March 30, 2010
Yesterday, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston testified before Congress, urging that the federal wiretapping law be updated to protect Americans against secret video surveillance just as it protects against covert electronic eavesdropping. The Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs of the U...

EFF to Press for New Privacy Protections Against Hidden Video Surveillance in Senate Hearing Monday

Posted on March 25, 2010
Philadelphia - On Monday, March 29, at 10 a.m., the Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing in the Philadelphia federal courthouse on whether the federal electronic privacy laws need to be updated to better regulate secret video surveillance...

Geek Reading: Evan Ratliff on How to Disappear (or Not) in the Digital World

Posted on March 25, 2010
While researching a story for Wired Magazine about people who fake their own deaths, journalist Evan Ratliff began to wonder: How hard would it be to disappear in today's digital world? Email, online banking, mobile phones and other ubiquitous technologies leave traces of ourselves that can be easily tracked...

Work With EFF and TOR for Google's Summer of Code

Posted on March 24, 2010
Interested in working with EFF or TOR, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google's Summer Of Code 2010. At EFF, there are several projects we're focused on: First, TOSBack, which tracks changes to the terms of service of the Internet's most popular websites...

New Research Suggests That Governments May Fake SSL Certificates

Posted on March 24, 2010
Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on "secure" encrypted communications...

Google Stops its Chinese Censorship

Posted on March 24, 2010
Making good on its promise to stop censoring results of its Chinese language website earlier this year, Google announced on Monday that its uncensored search services are now live. Chinese Internet users searching at google.cn are now redirected to google...

Check Out EFF's Favorite Books

Posted on March 24, 2010
We are a bookish crowd here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so we figured it might be interesting to share a list of some of our favorite books. Choosing categories was a contentious process, but we ultimately decided to split up the list into the following rough categories: Copyright, Trademark and Innovation Privacy, Surveillance, and Security Technology and Internet Culture International Internet Issues Economics and Business History, Politics, and Electronic Voting The top 3 in each category are standouts or classics, but every book in the list has inspired fresher, smarter considerations about technology, civil liberties, and what it means to be on the electronic frontier...

Public Interest Groups Call On IP Czar To Get The Priorities Straight

Posted on March 24, 2010
In comments filed today, EFF, Public Knowledge, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, the Special Libraries Association and U.S. PIRG urged the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), Victoria Espinel, to pay careful attention to the various costs and benefits of different enforcement mechanisms and objectives, and spend public funds on IP enforcement only where the alleged violations will cause significant economic harm under clearly settled legal rules...

Video: EFF Panel on "Architecture Is Policy"

Posted on March 23, 2010
Technology design can maximize or decimate our basic rights to free speech, privacy, property ownership, and creative thought. Earlier this month, EFF board members discussed these societal impacts in a panel at Carnegie Mellon: "Architecture is Policy...

EFF Urges Supreme Court to Protect Text-Message Privacy

Posted on March 23, 2010
Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the United States Supreme Court today to ensure that modern communications methods such as text messages retain the constitutional privacy protections applied to earlier technologies. In an amicus brief in City of Ontario v...

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