Legal Briefings Still Under Seal After Government Demands for SecrecyThe Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security. While the facts surrounding the specific companies and the NSLs they are challenging cannot be disclosed, their legal positions are already public: the NSL statute is a violation of…
Author: EFFSource
The RightsCon summit is making its way back to Silicon Valley March 3-5, opening its doors to human rights experts, engineers, government representatives, and other activists from around the globe who will discuss solutions to human rights challenges. As such, a number of EFF staff members are looking forward to attending and speaking at the three-day conference. While EFF encourages you to attend as many RightsCon events as you can, be sure to catch the following: Monday, March 3, 3:30PM – 4:45PM: State of the Fight Against State-Sponsored Malware featuring Global Policy Analyst, Eva Galperin Monday, March 3, 5:00PM –…
On back-to-back days this week, residents in Texas and Washington received some extra legal protection for the contents of their cell phones. These decisions, while only binding on law enforcement within each respective state, could play an important role on the ongoing debate on cell phone privacy specifically, and applying legal protections against unreasonable searches and seizures to new technologies generally. Texas: a cellphone is not like a pair of pants or shoes First, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in State v. Granville that an inmate locked in jail maintained an expectation of privacy in the contents of…
This week, EFF asked a federal court in Florida to unseal records from the Disney v. Hotfile case describing Warner Brothers’ system for sending takedown notices to websites. Warner, and the other plaintiffs in the case, want that information kept secret forever. But Congress is asking for input about the notice-and-takedown system created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and a hearing is coming up soon. The Patent and Trademark Office is also holding public meetings on the DMCA. It’ll be harder for the public to get involved in these conversations without knowing some basic information about how big copyright…
The European Commission’s open consultation on copyright ends in less than a week. It’s a rare and important opportunity for anyone who uses the Internet— whether you are a student or artists, librarian or entrepreneur— to influence the future of innovation policy in the region. The 80 question “Public Consultation on the Review of the EU Copyright Rules” can be dizzying to tackle on its own, but there are several easy-to-use platforms that can help anyone with navigating the survey. How to Submit Your Own Comments Let’s Fix EU Copyright! — Choose from a list of categories that best describe…
‘Abstract Ideas’ Patents Hurt Technology IndustrySan Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley, urged the U.S. Supreme Court today to clean up the legal mess that is software patent law, reining in overbroad patents that are impermissibly abstract. In front of the court is Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, a long running case about a computer system that helps with closing financial transactions by avoiding settlement risk. In its amicus brief filed today, EFF argues that allowing a patent on this system goes against previous Supreme Court rulings that…
We’ve made considerable progress in our fight against patent trolls. The House, you may remember, resoundingly passed the Innovation Act last year. The President has since said he would sign it, and make a strong statement in support of reform in this year’s State of the Union address. Now, we await on the Senate to act (speaking of which, have you signed our letter urging such action?). Even with this progress, however, we’ve long worried about the demand letter problem. Last year, when we launched our demand letter database Trolling Effects, we wrote: The letters demanding these payments are often…
Liberation Music Will Fix Its Copyright Policies and Pay CompensationSan Francisco – Prof. Lawrence Lessig has settled his lawsuit against an Australian record label over the use of clips of a popular song by the band Phoenix in a lecture that was later posted online. Liberation Music, which represents Phoenix in New Zealand, claimed the clips infringed copyright, demanded YouTube take down the lecture, and then threatened to sue Lessig. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Jones Day, Lessig fought back, asserting his fair use rights in court. “Too often, copyright is used as an excuse to silence…
It’s time for Congress to follow the Sixth Circuit’s lead and update one of the main online privacy laws—the Electronic Privacy Communications Act (ECPA). In the past, the Department of Justice has used the archaic law to obtain private online communications without obtaining a probable cause warrant as the Fourth Amendment requires. A bill co-sponsored by Reps. Kevin Yoder, Tom Graves, and Jared Polis—HR 1852, The Email Privacy Act—seeks to update ECPA by requiring a probable cause warrant whenever the government wants to access your online private messages. The bill is slowly making its way through Congress, but we can…
The only thing standing in the way of patent reform is the United States Senate. The House passed the Innovation Act in December with a bipartisan 325-91 vote. President Obama has said he’ll sign the bill and asked Congress during his State of the Union to “pass a patent reform bill that allows our businesses to stay focused on innovation, not costly and needless litigation.” It’s now up to the Senate to help put an end to costly, destructive patent troll litigation and threats. And they need to hear from you: you the inventor, you the entrepreneur, you the investor,…