Intellectual Property Law

In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's

Posted on April 07, 2009
We had hoped this would go differently. Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments...

Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy

Posted on April 06, 2009
San Francisco - The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration's position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) warrantless wiretapping program, filing a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA late Friday...

Reform The PATRIOT Act: Stop Abuse of National Security Letters

Posted on April 06, 2009

Warner Music Targeting More than YouTube

Posted on April 06, 2009
In recent weeks, we've repeatedly covered Warner Music's (mis)use of YouTube's Content ID (i.e., audio fingerprinting) tools to remove lots of videos that are clearly fair uses. Now ZDNet columnist Jason Perlow reports that Warner Music came after his wife's video slideshow on Vimeo, another video hosting site: That Warner Music Group/Time Warner would actually care about some random slide show of 40-somethings getting drunk at a suburban New Jersey synagogue set to 15 and 20-year-old low-quality monaural rendered audio that they happen to have rights to is just extremely sad...

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Second Circuit Expands Trademark Rights, Restricts Consumer Search Options

Posted on April 03, 2009
In a what could be a potentially serious blow to Google's AdWords business, and to consumers? ability to find information about competing offerings on the Internet, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that a trademark owner can sue Google for trademark infringement for selling its mark as a keyword as part of the AdWords program...

Broad Coalition Urges Obama to Diversify IP Appointments

Posted on April 02, 2009
Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined a broad coalition of public interest groups and trade associations calling for President Obama to diversify future appointments to intellectual property policy positions and create new offices devoted to promoting innovation and free expression...

iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England

Posted on April 02, 2009
President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so? You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question. Traditionally, it has been the job of the "first sale" doctrine to enable gift giving -- that's the provision of copyright law that entitles the owner of a CD, book, or other copyrighted work, to give it away (or resell it, for that matter), notwithstanding the copyright owner's exclusive right of distribution...

Stand Up for Your Right To Read

Posted on April 02, 2009
Last month, a group called The Author's Guild raised loud objections to the text-to-speech feature in Amazon's new Kindle 2. They claimed that reading a book out-loud is a violation of US copyright law. We had hoped that Amazon would stand up to this legally baseless bullying and support their customers...

Every Vote Counts: the EU Copyright Term Extension Battle Heats Up

Posted on March 30, 2009
The recording industry has been stridently preparing for victory in their battle to double the term of sound copyright in the EU. But their campaign has hit an unexpected hitch -- individual governments among the EU member states think their demands overstep the mark...

Observations from the Three-Strikes Rumor Storm

Posted on March 27, 2009
Earlier this week, reports that ISPs were going to be cooperating with the RIAA's "three strikes" plans triggered alarm bells. Three-strikes proposals to kick customers off the Internet for alleged file-sharing have struggled to find acceptance across the world, so it seemed unusual for American ISPs to be contemplating plans that would result in the termination of paying customers...

Stating the Case Against DRM to the FTC

Posted on March 25, 2009
Wednesday, EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry will be testifying at the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) town hall meeting on digital rights management technologies, or DRM. After years of observing DRM's development, suing Sony for its destructive SecuROM DRM, defending free speech for researchers and bloggers, and speaking out against DRM's use, EFF's stance is quite clear: DRM is harmful to consumers, it undermines competition and innovation, and unnecessarily preempts users' fair uses of copyrighted content -- all while making no appreciable dent in "digital piracy...

AP Invokes DMCA Against Obama "Hope" Poster Artist

Posted on March 23, 2009
The lawsuits between Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic tricolor Obama "Hope" poster) and the Associated Press have an interesting legal wrinkle that is worth examining: AP claims that Fairey violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the creation of the famous poster...

More on Choruss, Pro and Con

Posted on March 20, 2009
As we've discussed previously, Choruss is the name of the new entity, backed by three major record labels, that is interested in granting blanket licenses to universities (and someday residential ISPs) to authorize the music swapping (on P2P and otherwise) that has become a fact of digital life...

Sunshine Week: Traffic Analysis of Fall 2004

Posted on March 20, 2009
All this week we've been celebrating Sunshine Week by analyzing some of the secret documents from our list of missing NSA surveillance documents. For our final post of the week, we looking at the context of a series of documents from the fall of 2004, right around the time that the Bush Administration learned that the press had learned of the warrantless wiretapping program...

Sunshine Week: October 11, 2002 NSA Surveillance Memo

Posted on March 19, 2009
Earlier this week, we published a list of missing documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program as part of EFF's celebration of Sunshine Week, and began to analyze what some of these missing documents might be. Today, we continue by examining the context surrounding an intriguing 2002 memo known as OLC 129...

Attorney General Sets New FOIA Policy; Its Impact Remains to be Seen

Posted on March 19, 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder today issued new guidelines (PDF) on federal agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The guidelines were issued pursuant to a directive issued by President Obama on January 21, his first full day in office...

Sunshine Week: Commonsense Transparency from ReadTheBill.org

Posted on March 19, 2009
Anyone that has attempted to keep a close eye on the work of Congress has experienced the frustration of seeing attempts to sneak new language into a bill hours before a vote, or, as we saw often in the fight against the FISA Amendments Act, seeing legislators disappear behind closed doors during critical moments of a debate...

Sunshine Week: February 8, 2002 NSA Surveillance Memo

Posted on March 18, 2009
Yesterday, we published a list of missing documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program as part of EFF's celebration of Sunshine Week, and began to analyze what some of these missing documents might be. Today, we turn to a document known as OLC 62...

CNET Axes Blogger Who Exposed Whitehouse.gov Privacy Issue

Posted on March 18, 2009
Former CNET blogger Chris Soghoian has produced some of the best coverage on the issue of privacy for users of government websites. His work on the use of YouTube cookies and other tracking technologies on whitehouse.gov brought public attention to the issue, and inspired EFF to get involved...

Sunshine Week: Missing Documents on NSA Surveillance

Posted on March 17, 2009
As part of EFF's celebration of Sunshine Week, we're providing a list of missing documents related to the National Security Agency?s warrantless wiretapping program. As a result of various Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and Congressional investigations, the government has provided information about the existence of various memoranda and other documents that are responsive to requests for information about the NSA Program...

Anonymity and Privacy Should Not Add Up to Prison Time

Posted on March 17, 2009
Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today urged the United States Sentencing Commission to reject modifications to federal sentencing guidelines that would require extra prison time for people who use technology that hides one's identity or location...

DOJ Seeks Jail Time for Music Sharing

Posted on March 17, 2009
The battle to control online music has taken a particularly outrageous turn. As if private censorship, fines, intimidation and blacklisting weren't enough, now the Department of Justice — for the first time we're aware of — is threatening to throw a man in jail for noncommercial music-sharing...

EFF Urges Court to Block Government's Ploy for Cell Phone Location Information

Posted on March 17, 2009
Philadelphia - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a U.S. appeals court Monday to block the government's repeated attempts to seize cell phone location information -- a record of where the cell phone user travels throughout each day -- without a warrant in violation of communications privacy statutes and the Constitution...

EFF Launches Search Tool for Uncovered Government Documents

Posted on March 16, 2009
San Francisco - In celebration of Sunshine Week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched a sophisticated search tool that allows the public to closely examine thousands of pages of documents the organization has pried loose from secretive government agencies...

Help EFF Make Open Government a Reality

Posted on March 15, 2009
On his first day in office, President Obama took the advice of EFF and other nonprofits, ordering federal agencies to share more information with the public — particularly emphasizing openness in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests...

Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle

Posted on March 13, 2009
Even as it attacks DRM on music, Apple is continuing to add more DRM to its own hardware (we recently documented all of Apple's various hardware DRM restrictions). The latest example is the new iPod Shuffle. According to the careful reviewers at iLounge, third-party headphone makers will have to use yet-another Apple "authentication chip" if they want to interoperate with the new Shuffle...

Google Begins Behavioral Targeting Ad Program

Posted on March 12, 2009
Today Google launched its behavioral targeting ad program, which it calls "interest-based advertising." This move has been widely expected once Google completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick one year ago today. The issues with behavioral advertising have been with us for over a decade (DoubleClick was founded in 1996, and privacy issues

minilinks for 2009-03-12

Posted on March 12, 2009
Whitehouse.gov Continues YouTube UseThe White House appears to have ended its "experiment" with hosting its own videos, and has returned to using YouTube. Will user info be harvested for Google's targeted advertising? Court Tosses Gibson's Guitar Hero SuitGibson Guitar's patent infringement suit against the Guitar Hero game was thrown out of court as "frivolous...

The Fair Use Massacre Continues: Now Warner?s Going After the Babies

Posted on March 12, 2009
First they came for the teenagers. Could toddlers be far behind? Nope. Thanks to the good folks at YouTomb, we?ve learned that Warner Music?s automated takedown net has now caught two videos of little kids being little kids. Of course we can?t show you the videos since they?re, well, censored, but the YouTomb snapshots tell most of the story...

global minilinks for 2009-03-05

Posted on March 06, 2009

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