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Full list of cases, subdirectories, and documents Email allows groups to grow from a dozen friends to a hundred hobbyists to a huge, national organization. Meanwhile, blogging is transforming journalism, and websites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are part of a new Library of Alexandria being built online. In countless ways, the Internet is radically enhancing our access to information and empowering us to share ideas with the entire world. Speech thrives online, freed of limitations inherent in other media and created by traditional gatekeepers. Preserving the Internet's open architecture is critical to sustaining free speech. But this technological capacity means little without sufficient legal protections. If laws can censor you, limit access to certain information, or restrict use of communication tools, then the Internet's incredible potential will go unrealized. The government has time and again tried doing just that—indeed, censorship laws have often aimed at speech that could not be similarly restricted offline. And when old laws are not properly adapted to this medium, it's all too easy for the government, companies, and individual litigants to undermine your rights. EFF defends the Internet as a platform for free speech and believes that when you go online, your rights should come with you. Learn more below and consider supporting our efforts. XXXing With Free SpeechUnder the guise of protecting children from sexual and "offensive" material, the government has repeatedly embraced overreaching policies that chill lawful speech. In ACLU v. Reno, EFF and a coalition of public interest groups achieved a landmark victory by successfully challenging the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act. The U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision affirmed that online speech deserves the full protection of the First Amendment. EFF continues to fight related censorship policies today. Bloggers' Rights
Privacy & Free SpeechSince the times of the Federalist Papers, anonymity has supported critical social and political discourse. Though your email address or screenname might seem to hide your identity, individuals can too easily abuse the legal system to violate your rights. Say you want to blow the whistle on some corporate malfeasance, so you post an anonymous message online. Without your knowledge, the company's CEO can unmask your identity through a frivolous lawsuit and a subpoena to your online service provider. EFF has protected many "John Does" against these types of suits. EFF also supports the development of privacy-protecting technologies. Spam and "Certified" Email Systems
Defending Communication TechnologiesInnovation is inextricably tied to freedom of speech and needs to be protected from established businesses that use the law to stifle creativity and kill competition. By suing P2P systems in MGM v. Grokster, Hollywood sought a veto power over new technologies that enable both lawful and unlawful uses, including other powerful tools for lawful speech. EFF defended one of the P2P software companies all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to overturn the Betamax doctrine—the bedrock principle protecting developers of multipurpose technologies. Free Speech and IPImagine if you couldn't include excerpts from your sources in your research reports, or you couldn't include a quote from a politician in your editorial about an election. Despite strong legal protection for these types of activities, bogus copyright claims and other intellectual property threats can still have a chilling effect on speech. For instance, only a year prior to the 2004 presidential elections, a group of students and activists published on the Internet internal memos suggesting that electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold knowingly distributed flawed e-voting machines. When Diebold used specious copyright claims to force people to take the memos down, EFF fought back—successfully defending the publishers and winning damages for copyright abuse. |
Blogs can be diaries, political pamphlets, newspapers, and much more. But regardless of their subject or format, blogging is both a simple and a revolutionary tool for speech. In Apple v. Does, EFF successfully defended online journalists' right to protect the confidentiality of sources just as offline reporters do, and we are working hard to defend bloggers' rights to free expression, political speech, and anonymity. To help bloggers know their rights, EFF created a legal guide.
Email recipients—not ISPs or other intermediaries—should control when and how they receive their mail. One person's spam is another's critical political update. That's why EFF led a coalition to oppose AOL's pay-to-send "certified" email system. This scheme creates a perverse incentives, giving preferential treatment to those senders who can pay and rewarding intermediaries for mistakes made by their blocking systems. ISPs' first obligation should be to deliver all wanted mail and only filter at the user's discretion.