For the past two years, EFF has been pushing Congress to pass legislation to rein in patent trolls. Starting with the introduction of the Shield Act in 2012, momentum has built for patent reform. And we saw dramatic results in December of last year when the House overwhelmingly passed the Innovation Act. Since then, the ball has been in the Senate’s court. But weeks and months have gone by without a comparable bill being introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee. While the Senate dawdles, patent trolls continue their rampage. A new report from legal analytics startup Lex Machina confirms that…
Author: EFFSource
EFF Survey Shows Improved Privacy and Transparency Policies of the Internet’s Biggest CompaniesSan Francisco – Technology companies are privy to our most sensitive information: our conversations, photos, location data, and more. But which companies fight the hardest to protect your privacy from government data requests? Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) releases its fourth annual “Who Has Your Back” report, with comprehensive information on 26 companies’ commitments to fighting unfair demands for customer data. The report examines the privacy policies, terms of service, public statements, and courtroom track records of major technology companies, including Internet service providers, email providers, social…
Today the FCC is meeting to discuss new rules that could determine the future of network neutrality. There’s been a lot of news circulating about what the FCC’s plan will contain. We’ll have some analysis to share shortly. In the meantime, though, Internet users need to tell the FCC that we want real net neutrality, and we don’t want net discrimination. Visit DearFCC.org to submit comments to the FCC’s official Open Internet docket. Fill out the form to submit your comments, and tell the FCC you oppose rules that will stifle Internet innovation and creativity. Personalize it. Tell a story.…
This blog post is co-authored by Heesob Nam, patent attorney, Intellectual Property activist, and a founder and board member of OpenNet Korea. The South Korean government has adopted an aggressive interpretation of their copyright law to block websites in the name of copyright enforcement. In practice, this emulates the kinds of extreme provisions that were in the defeated U.S. SOPA bill. Its takedown system mirrors the SOPA provision on copyright holders being empowered to compel Internet service providers (ISPs) to block foreign sites through a simple allegation of copyright infringing uses of their platform. Recent cases have revealed a blocking…
The European Court of Justice has been taking a stronger role this year in calculating how human rights apply to new technology, most recently with decisions repealing the EU’s digital data retention directive. Now, in Google Spain v. Mario Costeja González, it has outlined how Europeans might have public information about them deleted from search engine listings — even if that data is available elsewhere, part of the legal record, and true. The case concerns a Spanish citizen who sued Google to remove search links to a 1998 article in the newspaper La Vanguardia, which listed a real estate auction…
It’s official: the last holdout for the open web has fallen. Flanked on all sides by Google, Microsoft, Opera and (it appears) Safari’s support and promotion of the EME DRM-in-HTML standard, Mozilla is giving in to pressure from Hollywood, Netflix et al, and will be implementing its own third-party version of DRM. It will be rolled out in Desktop Firefox later this year. Mozilla’s CTO, Andreas Gal, says that Mozilla “has little choice.” Mozilla’s Chair, Mitchell Baker adds, “Mozilla cannot change the industry on DRM at this point.” At EFF, we disagree. We’ve had over a decade of watching this…
Whether you’re filling out a mail-in ballot or planning to rock the polling station in person on election day (June 3), if you’re a California voter we urge you to please vote “yes” on Prop. 42. This statewide ballot measure would ensure that local agencies, such as cities and counties, obey the California transparency laws that guarantee the public’s right to access government documents and attend government meetings. These laws—the California Public Records Act (CPRA) and the Ralph M. Brown Act—are crucial to EFF’s efforts to defend civil liberties, as well as to the work of every investigative journalist and…
People have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their private digital communications such as email, and therefore the Fourth Amendment protects those communications. It’s a simple extension of the Supreme Court’s seminal 1967 ruling in Katz v. United States that the Fourth Amendment protected a telephone conversation held in a closed phone booth. But in a brief recently filed in a criminal terrorism case arising from surveillance of a United States citizen, the government needs only a few sentences to argue this basic protection doesn’t apply, with potentially dramatic consequences for the rest of us. United States v. Mohamud Mohamed…
It’s been hard to go a day without hearing news about the Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, and his highly contested plan for the future of network neutrality. Google and Netflix signed a letter with nearly 150 other Internet companies calling on the FCC to reconsider its plan, which would purportedly bless the creation of “Internet fast lanes.” Over a million people across the country have spoken out against that idea, worried that a “pay to play” Internet will be less hospitable to competition, innovation, and expression. And while Chairman Wheeler and his fellow commissioners have been blogging about…
During the aftermath of World War II, months before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the formation of the United Nations, states in the Americas gathered to create the very first international human rights instrument of the modern era. In the midst of military regimes across Latin America, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man was established in 1948, setting out the obligations for States to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere. A few years later, in 1969, States ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, also known as the…