Privacy, Economic and Free Speech Flaws in Proposed Bitcoin Regulatory SchemeSan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with reddit and the Internet Archive, today filed formal comments with the New York State Department of Financial Services opposing the state’s proposed regulations for digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In the letter, EFF argues that on top of damaging privacy and harming innovation, New York’s “BitLicense” regulatory scheme also risks infringing on First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and association. The State of New York is currently considering BitLicense, a sprawling regulatory framework that would mandate licenses for a…
Author: EFFSource
We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend. Another case challenging the telephone records program, Klayman v. Obama, will be argued on November 4 in Washington DC before the DC Circuit and EFF will be participating as an amicus. The Smith v. Obama case records are all here: but we thought we’d highlight three of…
This Monday, October 20 marks the first day of Open Access Week, an international event that celebrates the wide-ranging benefits of enabling open access to information and research–as well as the dangerous costs of keeping knowledge locked behind publisher paywalls. This year’s theme is Generation Open. There are tons of events happening around the world for Open Access Week. We wanted to share a handful of ones that we’ve heard about, most of which are screenings of the fantastic film, The Internet’s Own Boy, a documentary about the late Internet activist and pioneer Aaron Swartz. We’re delighted that many of…
FBI Director James Comey gave a speech yesterday reiterating the FBI’s nearly twenty-year-old talking points about why it wants to reduce the security in your devices, rather than help you increase it. Here’s EFF’s response: The FBI should not be in the business of trying to convince companies to offer less security to their customers. It should be doing just the opposite. But that’s what Comey is proposing—undoing a clear legal protection we fought hard for in the 1990s.1 The law specifically ensures that a company is not required to essentially become an agent of the FBI rather than serving…
Today Wikileaks published a new draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter. This draft text, from May 2014, gives us another look into the current state of negotiations over this plurilateral trade agreement’s copyright provisions since another draft was leaked last year. And what we’re seeing isn’t pretty. The TPP still contains text on DRM, ISP liability, copyright term lengths, and criminal enforcement measures, and introduces new provisions on trade secrets that have us worried. Anti-Circumvention Despite an over-abundance of evidence that laws punishing circumvention of DRM do far more harm than good, the USTR continues to press…
Canadian digital rights organization, OpenMedia, released a copyright report today that crowdsourced input from users from around the world. Their survey asked users to express their thoughts about copyright and to determine what issues they would like policymakers to prioritize in constructing innovation policy domestically and internationally. The process took over two years and attracted participation from over 300,000 people in 155 countries. The result was published today at Our Digital Future, which features the highlights of this extensive study. Hundreds of thousands of users have spoken and they have made three main recommendations to policymakers. First, users called for…
When you buy a device, you expect to own it. You expect to be able to open it up, mess with it, and improve it. At the very least, you expect it to continue to work for its intended purpose. What you don’t expect is that the manufacturer will remotely cause the device to stop functioning unless you agree to be bound by new legal terms governing your relationship with them. Yet this is how Nintendo’s update to its end-user license agreement (EULA) for the Wii U works, as described by Youtube user “AMurder0fCrows” in this video. He didn’t like…
Any organization that takes a stand on controversial issues can expect some criticism. And this criticism might involve someone commenting on the organization’s trademarked name or logo. For example, opponents of the NRA have suggested that “NRA Stands for Next Rifle Assault.” Critics of the ACLU have mocked it as the “Anti-Christian Lawyers Association.” The former CEO of the RIAA was fond of deriding EFF as the “Everything for Free Foundation.” Whether you think these parodies are brilliant or lame, there should be no question that they are fully protected by the First Amendment. Unfortunately, a recent federal court decision…
Like clockwork, another news organization is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s hair-trigger take down process to stifle political commentary just when that commentary is most timely. This time it’s Gannett Co. Inc., a massive media conglomerate that owns, among many other publications, the Courier-Journal in Kentucky. The Courier-Journal’s editorial board interviewed a Democratic candidate for Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, and streamed the interview live. That stream included 40 uncomfortable seconds of the candidate trying desperately to avoid admitting she voted for President Obama (the president is none too popular in Kentucky). A critic posted the video clip online—and Gannett…
After months of delay, Warner has finally released documents detailing its notice and takedown practices. The documents were filed under seal in the now-defunct Hotfile litigation until a federal court (prompted by a motion from EFF) ordered Warner to produce them for the public. These documents confirm the movie studio’s abuse of the DMCA takedown process. They describe Warner “robots” sending thousands of infringement accusations to sites like the now-closed Hotfile without human review, based primarily on filenames and metadata rather than inspection of the files’ contents. They also show that Warner knew its automated searches were too broad and…