In The News: 2007
In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy
Adam Liptak, New York Times
The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network...
"People get pushed into settlements," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like."
Piracy and Privacy
Dan Mitchell, New York Times
In an effort to stymie Internet pirates, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a music industry group, is asking European lawmakers to require Internet service providers to use filters to block the illicit transfer of copyrighted material.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a privacy advocate, responded by sending a letter to the European Parliament arguing that such filters would be an “ineffective measure that will do little to practically address the concerns of major rights holders while imposing serious costs on the individual rights of European citizens.”The filtering technology would not be effective, according to the foundation, because pirates would simply encrypt files to bypass it in the same way that banks encrypt credit card information. Meanwhile, legitimate users of copyrighted material would be hampered in their ability to post video and music clips. And the costs would most likely be borne by service providers, and, by extension, their customers, the foundation said.
Amazon Wrangles Warner Into No-DRM Club
Chris Maxcer, E-Commerce Times
Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) has picked up the third major record label to let the online music retailer sell MP3 songs without digital rights management (DRM) schemes attached. Warner Music Group announced Thursday that Amazon customers can now buy and download songs from its artists... Amazon.com's DRM-free music store, Amazon MP3, launched in September and now boasts 2.9 million songs from more than 33,000 record labels. The company hasn't reported sales figures, but Bill Carr, Amazon.com's vice president of Digital Music, said its customers are delighted with Amazon MP3 and that the company has received thousands of e-mails thanking the company for offering DRM-free MP3 tracks.
"Ironically, it seems that DRM-free music actually decreases piracy somewhat," Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation , told the E-Commerce Times. "There are two reasons for that. One is that despite burning billions of dollars on DRM, nobody has ever implemented a DRM system that prevents any media from being available to pirates -- once media is available to pirates, it can be copied without limit. The second reason is that DRM sucks for the users ... people often choose to pirate stuff not because of the price, or not just because of the price, but because the DRM ruins the product they would have bought," he explained.
China on the Web: An Accident Waiting to Happen?
Katherine Noyes, Technology News
One might argue that China and the Internet are both like high-speed trains. Both are growing at an extremely rapid pace, and both are apparently unstoppable global economic forces that are reshaping the economic landscape. Unfortunately, one might also argue that they are on a collision course.
The intense world scrutiny could help "cast a spotlight" on China's policies, Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation , told the E-Commerce Times. On the other hand, "my fear is that it will also lead to more careful and secret repression, now that there's such strong pressure on the Chinese authorities to look 'cleaner than clean.'"
User-friendly Apple shows a blogger its ruthless core
John Naughton, The Observor
Visitors to ThinkSecret.com, a well-known site which publishes rumours and gossip about forthcoming Apple products, found an intriguing notice on the front page last Thursday.
'Apple and ThinkSecret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides,' it announced. 'As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and ThinkSecret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, ThinkSecret's publisher, said: "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."'AppleInsider and O'Grady's PowerPage fought back - with legal assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - arguing that the first amendment to the US Constitution protected them from being compelled to disclose their sources, a provision originally designed to protect journalists. Apple won at the first hurdle, but lost on appeal.
'The motion,' says Kurt Opsahl of the EFF, 'stopped Apple's lawsuit in its tracks and raised the prospect that Apple would have had to pay ThinkSecret substantial sums for its legal fees... While the court has never ruled, we believe the motion was meritorious, and Apple was looking at an embarrassing and expensive loss.'
Web crew hits Dallas to snap street-level views
David Flick, Dallas Morning News
What Kory Dunton saw last week from behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, Tina Winslow will soon be able to access from her Mac Pro.
Ms. Winslow is intrigued by the prospect, but also a bit worried.Stephen Chau, Google products manager, said Street View is an efficiency tool, allowing users to preview an unfamiliar neighborhood, judge whether parking will be a problem, even refresh their memories about what a restaurant or office building looks lik
But Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the online privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation, still has concerns.
"People are used to a certain amount of anonymity as they go about the day. They may be going to AA meetings, clinics, even hospitals," she said. "There are things you want to keep private."
Jersey Judge Shields Anonymous Blogger
Paul McNamara, NetworkWorld.com
In a free-speech case that has drawn widespread attention, a New Jersey judge has upheld the right of a blogger to criticize county officials anonymously by telling those officials to take their subpoena seeking the author’s identity and put it where the sun don’t shine.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been front and center in keeping Manalapan Township officials off the throat of this lonely pamphleteer. You can read all of the EFF’s legal filings about the case here.
"We're grateful that Judge Flynn upheld the First Amendment rights of our client and recognized that anonymous speakers should not be intimidated into silence through the discovery process," said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman in a press release. "Now 'daTruthSquad' can continue to discuss township business without fear of government reprisal."
Apple shuts down rumours website
BBC News
Apple has settled a legal row with tip site Think Secret that will see the website shut down.
The legal battle between Apple and the site blew up in January 2005 when Think Secret revealed details of the Mac Mini before its official unveiling.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) aided Think Secret in its legal fight to stop Apple forcing it to reveal its sources.
"I hope that Apple takes from this that it is neither useful nor wise to sue its fans," said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney for the EFF.
FBI E-Mail Shows Rift Over Warrantless Phone Record Grabs
Ryan Singel, Wired News
By now it's well known that FBI agents can't always be troubled to get a court order before going after a surveillance target's telephone and internet records. But newly released FBI documents show that aggressive surveillance tactics have even caused friction within the bureau.
The FBI tech agent's critical e-mail is best understood in light of the bureau's ongoing courtroom attempts to get cellphone location information without having to show probable cause, according to EFF lawyer Marcia Hofmann.
"For years the government has made dubious legal claims to justify tracking people's locations with minimal oversight," Hofmann said. "These docs show that the government hasn't satisfied its own weak standards in some cases."
FBI Email Shows Rift Over Warrantless Phone Record Grabs
Ryan Singel, Wired News
An internal email obtained by EFF from the FBI showed a field agent venting about his colleagues' assertive surveillance efforts, including attempts to sidestep court order requirements to get phone records from service providers.
FBI Recorded 27 Million FISA 'Sessions' in 2006
Ryan Singel, Wired Blog
EFF FOIA documents show that the FBI intercepted 27,728,675 "sessions" in fiscal year 2006 through surveillance technology that monitors telephone communications of suspected spies and terrorists. In contrast, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved a mere 2,176 FBI requests for court-ordered surveillance in 2006.
Declassified Docs Show Fight Over Surveillance, Telecom Immunity
Declan McCullagh, CNET
Documents released through an EFF Freedom of Information Act suit revealed how high-level Administration officials have pushed Congress to amend federal surveillance law and immunize telecommunications companies from lawsuits based on their complicity in unlawful government surveillance.
Software Helps Web Users Detect Interference
Associated Press Wire Service, Savannah Morning News
Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.
The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.
"People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP," said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.
The Most Anti-Tech Organizations in America
Mark Sullivan, PC World
Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country--those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.
The RIAA and MPAA have exercised considerable political and economic influence to push a legal and policy environment in which the content owners keep tight control of the way their content is distributed and used. "I think it's fair to say that their approach is that any innovation that they haven't signed off on is bad," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
U.S. Judge Orders Bush to Release Records of Telecom Firm Contacts
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on a federal court's decision that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence must release records to EFF detailing contacts with telecommunications companies related to a lobbying campaign to immunize the carriers from lawsuits over their role in unlawful government surveillance of millions of Americans.
Souder Says Biometrics The Solution, But Others Curse The Cure
Matthew M. Johnson, Congressional Quarterly
Rep. Mark Souder has become a crusader for biometrics ID cards, but admits the political environment is not yet ripe for making them a part of Americans’ everyday life.
IDs encrypted with images of their holders’ fingerprints and irises would not only be the best tool to identify terrorists, says the Indiana Republican, but would go a long way toward helping people avoid the inconveniences associated with many homeland security initiatives.
...
“There are lots and lots of ways that biometrics are not as reliable and infallible as people tend to think they are,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I would argue that the burden of proof is on the proponents of biometrics to show that it is actually going to be workable as security.”
EFF, Others Ask Supreme Court To Reinstate "Patent Exhaustion Doctrine"
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge have joined forces and filed an amicus brief (PDF) in a pending Supreme Court case that could help set limits on the number of times in a single supply chain that a patent holder can profit from its patents.
...
The public interest groups that have now filed a brief in the case see this as part of a larger issue: when you buy a product, do you own it? Can you control it? Can you repair it? The EFF, in particular, has fought for consumer ownership in several recent cases, including Lexmark's attempt to restrict the market for refilling its pricey inkjet cartridges.
Internet Subdomain Patent Reexamination
Technology News
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) of a bogus patent on Internet subdomains -- the fourth successful reexamination request from EFF's Patent Busting Project.
...
"The hard work of open source developers should not be taken out of the public domain and used to threaten other legitimate innovators," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, who heads EFF's Patent Busting Project. "Fortunately, the open source approach to development helped protect Apache and other web projects by creating the evidence needed to challenge this illegitimate patent."
What To Do When Goliaths Roar?
Randal Stross, New York Times
AS shoppers arm themselves for post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting later this week, they’ll also indulge in another, newer annual tradition: surfing the Web for advance information about Black Friday retail sales. By organizing sale prices from scattered newspaper circulars into a single database, the Internet has made it easy to search for particular items and compare prices — too easy, at least in the eyes of many major retailers.
...
Ms. Seltzer oversees the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a Web site that publicizes what it calls corporate misuse of cease-and-desist letters to curb legally protected speech on the Internet. The clearinghouse, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the clinics of seven law schools, posts copies of cease-and-desist letters that Wal-Mart, Macy’s and others send to Web publishers. One aim of the project is to publicly shame companies that casually dash off the letters.
Ruling Blocks Challenge To Wiretapping
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 — A federal appeals court said today that secrecy laws forced it to exclude critical evidence about the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program from being used by an Islamic charity in a lawsuit even though the mere existence of the program could no longer be considered a “state secret.”
...
A lawyer for the group leading that part of the lawsuit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an interview that he was heartened by the appeals court’s clear rejection of the government’s claim everything involved in the eavesdropping program should be considered a state secret. That could bode well for the remaining piece of the case, said the lawyer, Kevin Bankston.
Senate Judiciary Poised To Pass Total Information Awareness Bill
Elliot D. Cohen, BuzzFlash
Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would effectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project.
...
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization based in San Francisco that has filed a class action suit against AT&T, the company had installed a fiber-optic splitter at its San Francisco office that copies all e-mails and other Internet traffic passing through the system and deposits these copies into a separate government computer network. The EFF alleges that the secret NSA rooms, to which the copies are sent, contain "powerful computer equipment connected to separate networks. This equipment is designed to analyze communications at high speed, and can be programmed to review and select out the contents and traffic patterns of communications according to user-defined rules" (emphasis added).
DHS May Be Lessening DHS Regulations
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWeek
Media reports indicate that the agency is cutting back on some technology requirements and deadlines.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is among only a few of his peers to come out in support of the Bush administration's push for strict guidelines for state drivers' licenses, and is facing strong opposition in his plan to implement Real ID in the Empire State.
...
"There are a lot of issues of how [states] are supposed to do anything. How do you really verify a birth certificate? What does verification mean?" said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
AT&T To Get Tough On Piracy
Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
It wants to incorporate antipiracy technology to protect video content and attract advertisers, but runs the risk of enraging privacy advocates and others.
AT&T (T) may soon beef up its antipiracy arsenal. The biggest U.S. telephone company is considering technology that could give it a heads-up when customers are watching partners' copyrighted video, BusinessWeek has learned. AT&T is in talks with NBC Universal and Walt Disney (DIS) about using the knowhow to guard against illegal distribution of their shows and films.
...
AT&T's approach is likely to raise the hackles of privacy advocates, who have already slammed the phone company for its role in helping the Bush Administration tap citizens' phone lines. "They better be very careful," warns Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This is serious, serious stuff, to basically invade the privacy of all of your subscribers."
Yahoo May Be A Moral Pygmy, But Congress Is Hardly Better
Vindu Goel, San Jose Mercury News
Tuesday’s congressional hearing about Yahoo turning over information about two dissidents to the Chinese government got me all riled up — and not at Yahoo.
...
But Congress should think hard about how it’s undermining civil rights here at home before getting all holier-than-thou on U.S. companies trying to figure out how to do business in China, a place where the government’s power can be both murky and threatening.
“I wish Congress would put the practices domestically under the same magnifying glass,” said Danny O’Brien, international outreach coordinator at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that has advocated for privacy rights around the globe. “This is an inconsistent position.”
The Advertiser Over Your Shoulder
Brock Read, The Chronicle
When they warn students about the perils of social networking, college officials often point out that prospective employers pore over profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And the sites themselves aren’t shy about doing the same.
...
The social networks are going public with their microtargeting strategies just a week after the Federal Trade Commission held a hearing to consider whether it should regulate online advertising more aggressively. Privacy advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology had asked the commission to create a “Do Not Track” registry that would prohibit companies from logging people’s Web usage for advertising purposes. (Facebook officials showed up at the hearing to discuss their privacy policies.)
Privacy Advos Demand 'Do Not Track' List For Websites
Joe Fay, The Register
A coalition of US privacy organisations has demanded the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) set up a "do not track" list to allow consumers to surf the web without having their behaviour monitored, warehoused, and mined by marketeers.
...
The coalition, which includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Centre for Democracy and Technology, has demanded customers be able to opt out of being tracked by advertisers, just as US consumers can sign up to a do not call list to escape telemarketers.
Cable Vendors Could Face Lawsuits for P2P Blocking
Egan Orion, The Inquirer
WE'VE SEEN well informed speculation by industry insiders that Comcast is not the only cable broadband provider engaged in blocking Peer-to-Peer (P2P) uploads as a "network management" tactic to hold down its bandwidth costs and so increase profits.
If so, they might also end up facing possible future class-action lawsuits by customers or an organisation acting in the public interest, which was mentioned as a likely development at a Cnet bog yesterday.Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney, said " based on [our] own testing, as well as what has been reported, it seems clear that Comcast's techniques are bad for its customers and bad for innovation generally." ... While the EFF is still studying the matter for now, von Lohmann said it has "already been contacted by attorneys who are considering legal action against Comcast."
Comcast Admits Delaying Some Traffic
Peter Svensson, Associated Press, USA Today
NEW YORK — Comcast on Tuesday acknowledged "delaying" some subscriber Internet traffic, but said any roadblocks it puts up are temporary and intended to improve surfing for other users.
...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the AP's findings with its own tests — including spotting forged messages sent by Comcast's computers to shut down connections.
...
"These are the kinds of software bugs you get when you have ISPs messing around with hacking techniques to get some applications running on their networks and not others," said EFF's Eckersley, who is himself a Comcast subscriber.
Comcast To Face Lawsuits Over BitTorrent Filtering
Chris Soghoian, CNET News.com
The blogosphere is abuzz over an Associated Press investigative article this past Friday on the subject of Comcast's BitTorrent filtering. Briefly, there were a number of articles in early September which alleged that Comcast was using some fairly sneaky techniques to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast, of course, denied any such behavior. It took a month and a half, but both a mainstream media news organization as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have tested and confirmed the previously reported claims. It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes are also suffering.
...
I discussed this issue with Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Von Lohmann stated that "based on (our) own testing, as well as what has been reported, it seems clear that Comcast's techniques are bad for its customers and bad for innovation generally. The fact that Comcast's efforts are reportedly interfering with BitTorrent, Gnutella and Lotus Notes communications makes it clear that they are not narrowly targeted at particular users or protocols."
GPS is Turning Cellphones into Social Mapping Devices
Laura M. Holson, International Herald Tribune
Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?
But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If GPS made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.
"There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco.
"We don't know what the implications are," he added. "We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each other, and there are privacy risks we haven't begun to grapple with."
Nacchio Affects Spy Probe
Andy Vuong, The Denver Post
Recent revelations about former Qwest chief executive Joe Nacchio's classified-information defense, which went unheard during his insider-trading trial, are feeding the furor over the government's warrantless-wiretapping program.
Nacchio alleges the National Security Agency asked Qwest to participate in a program the phone company thought was illegal more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to court documents unsealed at the request of The Denver Post.Nacchio's claims could affect President Bush's controversial efforts to grant legal immunity to large telecommunications companies such as AT&T, which has been sued in connection with the surveillance program.
"The Nacchio materials suggesting that the NSA had sought telco cooperation even before 9/11 undermines the primary argument for letting the phone companies off the hook, which is the claim that they were simply acting in good faith to help the president fight the terrorists after 9/11," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group.
"The fact that these materials suggest that cooperation with the program was tied to the award of certain government contracts also contradicts their (phone companies') claims that they were simply acting in good faith to help fight the terrorists when it appears that they may have been motivated by financial concerns instead," Bankston said.
Studies Criticize Comcast For Upload Tampering
Wayne Freedman, ABC-7 San Francisco
Comcast is getting plenty of criticism after two separate studies found evidence the Internet giant is interfering with computers involved in peer-to-peer file sharing.
"The most common belief about this is they think file share users are using up too much of their network capacity," said Seth Shoen, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"You know when you're making a telephone call, the phone company doesn't pop up in the middle of the call and start advertising to you or say 'we think you made too many calls today, so we're going to start adding some noise to your conversation," said Shoen.
Piracy Fuels Brazil's Tecno Scene
Michael Astor, San Francisco Chronicle
This steamy city at the mouth of the Amazon river is a haven for pirates — the digital kind who copy CDs and DVDs by the thousands for illegal sidewalk sales. Belem is also home to one of Brazil's most thriving pop scenes: tecnobrega, a musical movement that's expanding exponentially thanks to musicians and producers who see copying as a marketing tool rather than intellectual property theft.
"It's this really gritty tacky, sleazy jungle music. It's just genius," said John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates protecting free speech in the digital age... "It's making it possible for every kid in Brazil to know their songs by the time they turn five," Barlow said. "It's actually good for a lot of money — you give it away and it will come back. That's literally true with information, not with property."
The Truth About Telecom Amnesty
Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
Today I interviewed Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lead counsel in the pending litigation against AT&T, alleging that AT&T violated multiple federal laws by providing (without warrants) unfettered access for the Bush administration to all telephone and Internet data concerning its customers...
I found this interview extremely illuminating, and it reveals just how much misinformation is being disseminated by amnesty advocates.I don't think it takes a lot of thought to wonder: "huh, the FISA law says that the exclusive means by which the Government can get information is either by a warrant or a short-term certification from the Attorney General in an emergency situation. Huh - do either of these two things justify ongoing wholesale surveillance of all of our customers for five years and counting?"
The answer to that has to be "no." I don't think you even need a law degree to figure that one out.
Verizon Freely Gave Phone Data to Feds Without Court Orders
Ellen Nakashima, Dallas News
Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telecom company, told congressional investigators that it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.
The company said it does not determine the emergency requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.
Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group in San Francisco, obtained records through a FOIA lawsuit showing that the FBI sought data from telecom companies about the calling habits of suspects and their associates, The New York Times reported.
Pentagon Review Faults Bank Record Demands
Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
Documents obtained by EFF through the Freedom of Information Act provided a glimpse into the Defense Department's use of National Security Letters to collect bank and credit information in certain Pentagon investigations. The documents revealed that the Defense Department has made systematic errors in its use of NSLs, much like those that the FBI has committed over the past few years.
FCC Takes a Pass on NSA Privacy Probe
Roy Mark, eWeek.com
The Federal Communications Commission will not pursue an investigation of telecoms cooperation with the National Security Agencys wiretapping activities. According to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, in Washington, such a probe would "pose an unnecessary risk of damage to national security."
In a related action involving the controversy, the Electric Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, announced on Oct. 5 it had hired two veteran Washington lobbyists to try to block amnesty for telecoms collaborating with the NSAs warrantless spying activities. The EFF is lead counsel in Hepting v. AT&T, one of many lawsuits aiming to hold telecommunications companies accountable for allegedly violating their customers privacy rights.
On Sept. 27, the EFF filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, demanding any records of a telecom industry lobbying campaign to block lawsuits over their compliance with illegal electronic surveillance.
"The White House is publicly calling for immunity for the telecoms, while a recent Newsweek article detailed a secretive lobbying campaign to block the lawsuits," Marcia Hofmann, an EFF attorney, said in a statement. "If there are back room deals going on at the Department of Justice, then Americans need to know about them now, before Congress passes any law that gets the telecom companies off the hook."
For a Song
Chin Wong, Manila Standard Today
“FOR a song” is a phrase that means “cheaply”—but don’t tell that to Jammie Thomas. Last week, the 30-year-old unwed mother from Duluth, Minnesota, was found guilty of violating music industry copyrights and ordered to pay a total of $222,000 to six record companies for songs she had shared on her computer using Kazaa, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network.
“Despite today’s verdict, tens of millions of Americans will continue sharing billions of songs, just as they have since Napster let the P2P genie out of the bottle nearly eight years ago,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said after the Thomas decision. “Every lawsuit makes the recording industry look more and more like King Canute, vainly trying to hold back the tide.”
EFF to Weigh in on First RIAA Downloading Trial Appeal
David Kravets, Wired News
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is litigating the government's secret wiretap program, said Monday it will lend a legal hand to Jammie Thomas, the nation's first pirate to lose a federal jury trial in a case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Fred von Lohmann, an EFF attorney, tells THREAT LEVEL that the San Francisco-based advocacy group will file a friend-of-the-court brief with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief might argue two points, surrounding Jury Instruction No. 15, which says: "The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from he copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."
Amazon's Unlocked Music Still Might Get You Sued
Brier Dudley, Seattle Times
When Amazon.com launched its MP3 store last week, I thought the Seattle company had found the perfect formula for selling digital music.
Does that mean it's time to say goodbye to the neighborhood record store?
I'd say no, after reading the fine print in Amazon's user agreement. That's when I decided to keep buying CDs, maybe forever.
Concerned that I was being paranoid, I floated this past Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a public-interest advocacy group.
He was surprised by the language and said it appears to enable record companies to pursue a breach of contract if, for instance, you loaned your mother an iPod containing MP3s bought from Amazon.
I Won’t Surrender to Download Bullies, Says Mother Fighting the Music Giants
Chris Ayres, Times Online
A single mother has made legal history by forcing America’s biggest record companies into a costly and potentially embarrassing trial after she refused to pay an out-of-court settlement for alleged music piracy...
Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer who specialises in intellectual property at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said that the RIAA’s legal campaign was having little effect. “I think by most any metric you choose, it’s been a failure,” he said.
Darpa Hatches Plan for Insect Cyborgs to Fly Reconnaissance
R. Colin Johnson, EE Times
Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its '"HI-MEMS" program succeeds... In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more--all predicted by Easton's 1990 book.
However, also founded in 1990 was the watch-dog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF, San Francisco), which has more than a little trepidation about Darpa realizing Easton's dreams of cyborg bugs conducting ubiquitous surveillance.
"Anyone who is just a little bit creative can imagine both useful and non-productive applications of remote-controlled animals--especially if ordinary people will mistake them for normal animals," said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the EFF.
New Fingerprint Tech Could Mean Never Losing Your Keys Again
By Alexis Madrigal, Wired News
Scientists in Great Britain hope you may never have to worry about losing your keys or forgetting your password again.
University of Warwick researchers have unveiled a new fingerprint recognition technology, which allows them to "unwarp" distorted prints...
No story about biometrics is complete without mentioning privacy concerns. As they say in business, if you can measure it, you can manage it. And not everyone wants to be managed, especially if the government or a big corporation has the calipers. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed it up, "Biometric technology is inherently individuating and interfaces easily to database technology, making privacy violations easier and more damaging."
FBI Surveillance Capability More Extensive Than Once Thought
JBS Staff, John Birch Society
Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation have provided disturbing details about the extent of the FBI’s ability to monitor the communications of American citizens.
Machinima Licenses Spell Out New Rules for Creators
Monty Phan, Wired News
No recent event made a bigger splash in machinima makers' world than Tuesday's record-smashing release of Halo 3. But last month, a different kind of Microsoft release came pretty close.
In August, the company set forth guidelines (innocuously titled "Game Content Usage Rules") governing how its intellectual property could be used for such works as machinima...
Even digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation signed off on the rules. Then, a few weeks after Microsoft issued its guidelines, Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, came out with its own machinima guidelines.
Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney who examined both sets of rules, said the main difference between them lies in a user's base set of rights. Blizzard includes an end-user licensing agreement with its game, essentially stripping players of all rights regarding its use for anything other than how it was intended. Now the company has given rights back to the player in the form of the machinima license.
EFF sues the DOJ for withholding records of telecom surveillance immunity lobbying
Ryan Paul , Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an effort to obtain records that could shed light on telecommunication industry lobbying activities. The EFF suspects that major telecommunications companies like AT&T have attempted to use political leverage to compel lawmakers to support legislation that would grant the companies legal immunity for their involvement in the federal government's extralegal electronic surveillance program.
Apple's Options for Stopping Open Source iPhone Use
Brad Reed, Network World
Although Apple's Steve Jobs has declared war on iPhone hackers, no one knows for certain how he plans to stop them...
Seth David Schoen, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks that fear of being prosecuted under the DMCA has proven effective in keeping several hobbyist open source developers from sharing their innovations on the Web.
EFF sues to uncover alleged telco lobbying
Stephen Lawson, InfoWorld
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes telecommunications carriers are pushing for an amnesty to protect them from lawsuits over alleged illegal wiretapping, and it is suing for the evidence...
The Bush administration has proposed granting amnesty retroactively to carriers who have helped the government in its antiterrorism spying efforts, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at EFF. Its proposals didn't make it into the recently passed Protect America Act of 2007, which expanded the government's power to intercept Americans' overseas communications without warrants, but could still be added to it, Opsahl said.
Ruling eases government's efforts for cell phone tracking
Linda Rosencrance , ComputerWorld
A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that the government doesn't need probable cause to obtain a warrant allowing it to use a person's cell phone to track his past movements...
"This is the first decision that's been about historical tracking," said Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group in Washington.
"The idea is that the government is using this information, that most people don't know their cell phone transmits, in order to track you, and they are arguing for an extremely low standard under this complicated statutory regime," Granick said. "Most people probably consider this information to be very private -- where you travel and where you've been. So the concern is for something so invasive, the government should have to demonstrate that it's information that they really need."
More Legal Perils in the Social Media World (Web 2.0)
Nina Kaufman, Entrepreneur
In some ways, the Internet is the Wild West . . . and Web 2.0 is like the Wild West meets the Sci-Fi Channel — unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and often bizarre. If you’re involved in, or thinking about, doing business online at all, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a great resource. They’re even hosting a one-day Compliance Bootcamp on October 10, 2007 for people who handle issues arising from users and user-generated content.
Creationist vs. Atheist YouTube War Marks New Breed of Copyright Claim
Rob Beschizza, Wired News
A dispute between an atheist group and a creationist group over some postings on YouTube has critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act crying foul. They say it's a new and inappropriate use of DMCA, which is becoming a frequent weapon in nasty political and cultural battles...
The videos were eventually reposted, and Rational Response Squad's account was reinstated. "The default, unfortunately, is that (sites like YouTube) take it down, and leave it to the user to issue a counter-notice," said Corynne McSherry, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It was clearly fair use, and their claim was clearly bogus. It was just the fastest way they could think of to get it taken down."
Telcos seek wiretapping immunity as legal pressure mounts
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
Always eager to lighten the load of overworked bureaucrats, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has volunteered its services to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. In a Wednesday letter, EFF legal director Cindy Cohn urged Martin to heed Rep. Ed Markey's request for an investigation into alleged lawbreaking by the nation's largest telecommunications carriers. Noting that EFF has been deeply involved in the controversy from its outset, Cohn offered to assist Martin in investigating the allegations.
U.S. collecting personal data on travelers
Dallas Morning News
The U.S. government is collecting much more detailed electronic records than previously disclosed on the travel habits of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials...
But DHS TRIP does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy underlying the system. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy Act requirements, including the right to "contest the content of the record," a traveler can't correct erroneous information, Mr. Sobel said.
Legal Issues Surrounding Online Music Storage
Michael Hoffman, Daily Tech
Are you worried about legal ramifications against online file locker services? I contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization aimed at "defending freedom in the digital world," hoping to get a brief view of basic legal rights that users have.
The topic of users being safe from possible lawsuits is a hard topic to discuss, but "users are pretty safe," according to Fred von Lohmann, EFF senior staff attorney. "It'd be a long shot" to see the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or other copyright holders attempt to take legal action against users.
Legal Suicide for Web 2.0 start-ups: A beginner's guide
Rafe Needleman, Webware
I got an email from Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday. It began, "Half the companies you blog about have copyright or privacy legal issues simmering just under the surface. Since most of them are thinly capitalized, when they get into trouble, they're likely to call EFF for legal advice. Several already have."
I called von Lohmann right away, since I've had a nagging feeling for months that too many of the interesting products I've been seeing were legally shaky. So I talked with him to come up with this list: 9 Fun Ways Web 2.0 Startups Can Commit Legal Suicide.
Drivers test paying by mile instead of gas tax
Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
Beginning early next year, drivers in six states will begin testing a new way to pay for roads and transit: Commuters will be charged for the miles they drive rather than paying taxes on gasoline purchased...
Privacy advocates worry about the use of satellite navigation technology to track drivers' movements. "Where you go is something that, for the most part, people consider private," says Lee Tien, an attorney who specializes in privacy issues for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The second point is, it's the sort of thing we do to the bad guys. Where do you hear a lot about GPS tracking? It's for prisoners or people who are out on probation."
Audio: Music biz's future rests on key changes
Bob Moon, Marketplace - NPR
When it comes to file sharing and illegal downloads, it's the big music labels that complain the loudest about being ripped off. Bob Moon reports on some ideas that might help the recording industry face the musical future.
(Featuring EFF's Fred von Lohmann)
Audio: Free? Illegal? ... What's the difference?
Bob Moon, Marketplace - NPR
Free doesn't always mean legal when you're downloading music. And critics say the recording industry's muddying the waters its spent years in court trying to clear up. Bob Moon reports.
(Featuring EFF's Fred von Lohmann)
Kevin Bankston | New threats to privacy
Patrick Marshall, Government Computer News
As a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of Kevin Bankston’s primary responsibilities is to monitor the effects of new technologies on citizens’ privacy rights and occasionally undertake litigation to protect those rights. Recently, he experienced the issue firsthand when he was, without his knowledge, photographed by Google Street View, and his image was posted online.
Audio: No pause in music industry's tough play
Bob Moon, Marketplace - NPR
The recording industry has gotten serious about illegal file sharing. In the last four years it has filed thousands of lawsuits. But, as Bob Moon reports in a special series, even those targeted by mistake, like Tanya Andersen, get no reprieve.
(Featuring EFF's Fred von Lohmann)
DirecTV faces setback in dubious antipiracy campaign. Good.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com
DirecTV lost an important case on Tuesday. Programmers, security researchers, and anyone who believes in a limited government won...
Now, I'm not arguing that we should be applauding blatant DirecTV piracy. Neither is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which entered this case on the side of the defendants. If DirecTV can prove that Huynh and Oliver were watching TV shows for free, they should pay reasonable damages. But they shouldn't face six-figure fines for merely buying a smart-card programmer.
Unlocked iPhones For All
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
Seventeen-year-old George Hotz's much-publicized hacking of the iPhone involved ripping open his $600 device and diving in with a soldering iron--not a technique for the faint of heart...
But regardless of who has created unlocking software first, a larger question may be whether it's legal. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1999 prohibits users from circumventing technological locks that protect proprietary content. But in November 2006, Jennifer Granick, a cyber-law attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, won an exemption that makes it legal for users to break such locks to enable use of their phones on competing wireless networks.
Ready or Not, Voting Paper Trail Nears House Vote
Roy Mark, eWeek
The House of Representatives may vote as early as next week on legislation requiring a paper trail for electronic voting machines, according to a spokesman for bill sponsor Rush Holt, D-N.J. If successful in Congress, the bills provisions would take effect in time for the 2008 elections...
"Our support for H.R. 811 is tempered by profound disappointment that one of the bills pillars has been watered down to the point of ineffectiveness due to pressure from the proprietary software industry," the EFF said in a statement on its Web site.
The EFF added, "Having litigated cases in which prompt access to voting system source code is critical, EFFs strong advocacy for this bill has been based in large part on the source code disclosure requirement."
Court allows limited fines for theft of DirecTV signal
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
People who use equipment to watch satellite television without paying for it can be fined up to $10,000, but they aren't subject to a commercial piracy law aimed at manufacturers that carries damages as high as $100,000, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday...
The ruling is important because DirecTV has sent hundreds of thousands of letters seeking damages from people who have bought devices that can be used to intercept programs, said attorney Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued the case. He said the court not only reserved the higher penalties for commercial pirates but also implicitly recognized that only those who actually use the equipment for satellite interception - as opposed to innocent hobbyists and researchers - are subject to any penalties.
The latest bad idea from the RIAA: "ringle" to combine CD singles, ringtones
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
There's a place where good ideas go to die; unfortunately, the RIAA has just visited the facility and come back with the "ringle," whose name should tell you all you need to know about its chances of success...
Now, none of this ringtone foolishness would even exist if users could more easily create their own ringtones from music they have legally purchased. That's the EFF's position, and the group has just issued a call to arms against the cell phone and music industries for locking down ringtones.
Rogue FBI Letters Hint at Phone Companies' Own Data Mining Programs
Ryan Singel, Wired News
An FBI office under criminal investigation for sending emergency phone record requests to phone companies that included knowingly false statement also included requests for the phone companies to identify the "community of interest" for the targeted phone numbers, according to documents acquired through a government sunshine lawsuit...
See the original letters in this document (.pdf), acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a government sunshine request.
Army insists Web sites follow rules
Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Army personnel who monitor online security believe that official service Web sites are doing a good job protecting sensitive information despite a recent report showing nearly 2,000 violations last year...
Documents released last month as part of a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, showed results of the AWRAC’s review of Army-run Web sites and soldiers’ blog sites between January 2006 and January 2007.
License plate scanners help recover stolen cars, raise concerns
Associated Press
Officer David Callister was about to drive past the 1991 Nissan sedan when an alert sounded inside his cruiser and an image of a license plate flashed on his laptop. It was a signal that the run-of-the-mill clunker was stolen...
The most frequently cited potential drawback comes from privacy advocates, some of whom worry authorities will use the readers to track the movements of law-abiding people, a risk they said will grow as the devices drop in price and proliferate.
People may drive to abortion clinics, substance-abuse counseling meetings, race tracks or other lawful gatherings but might prefer to keep that private, the advocates said.
"I shouldn't have to take extra precautions to prevent the government from seeing what I am doing every Thursday night," said Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.
FBI Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times
Based on records released through an EFF FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department, the New York Times reported that the FBI asked telecommunications companies to turn over information about people in contact with individuals the FBI was investigating, though a degree removed from any suspicious activity and presumably innocent. An an EFF analysis explained, there is no question that this investigative technique is unlawful.
Federal judge slams government response to FOIA requests on surveillance program
Joshua Pantesco, Jurist
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Legal Counsel, and the office of the Attorney General to submit more information to the court in support of their motion for summary judgment in a consolidated lawsuit seeking the release of documents related to the government's domestic surveillance program...
The court is considering a consolidated lawsuit originating from FOIA requests filed by several privacy advocates, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the National Security Archive.
The world on your desktop
Economist
“EARTH materialises, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore.”
That vision from Neal Stephenson's “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992, aptly describes Google Earth, a computer program that lets users fly over a detailed photographic map of the world...
“When the coverage is everything and everywhere, there is going to be a big problem,” says Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet campaign group.
EFF Looks Back at Four Years of RIAA Lawsuits
Yahoo! Tech
This Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of the RIAA's first lawsuits against consumers, alleging that they were violating copyright by sharing songs on peer-to-peer networks. More than 20,000 (and probably about 30,000) people have been targeted since, and the RIAA shows no signs of slowing down. And yet, P2P networks continue to grow in popularity. Are the lawsuits having any effect?
The EFF takes us on a candid and interesting history lesson [PDF link] in this report, walking us through the RIAA's initial attempts to sue the technology companies out of existence, then, when that failed, to issue "DMCA subpoenas by the thousands," which eventually led to the first wave of settlements: One of the first to settle was a 12-year-old girl living in NYC public housing, forced to publicly apologize for her actions and pay a $2,000 settlement.
UC Berkeley, Stanford crack down on illegal downloading
Verne Kopytoff, San Francisco Chronicle
College students beware: Universities are ratcheting up punishments for illegally downloading music and video from your dorm rooms this school year in an effort to tamp down the popular pastime...
Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said that universities aren't taking a more aggressive stance against file sharing simply to protect students from lawsuits. Congressional committees, encouraged by the entertainment industry, have held hearings about illegal music downloading, which has universities scared that they could lose federal funding, he said.
House to consider e-voting reform bill
Grant Gross , ComputerWorld
The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote as early as Thursday on a bill that would require a paper record for electronic voting machines...
The Holt bill faces several obstacles to becoming law, said Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which supports the bill.
"It is not at all clear whether the bill will pass or, even if it does, whether a substantively similar companion bill will then pass the Senate," Zimmerman wrote on the EFF blog. "Like it or not, with election officials arguing that they're running out of time to implement wholesale changes, this likely amounts to Congress' only attempt to make any serious improvements to the nation's election procedures ahead of the 2008 presidential election."
Feds Tell Secret Spying Court to Keep Opinions Secret
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The Justice Department told a secret spying court Friday that the court lacked the power to even hear the ACLU's request for it to release court opinions about the government's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program...
While the government said that government sunshine requests were the more appropriate avenue to unseal the records, it also told the court that earlier in August another court ruled the documents were too secret to release, even in part. That ruling came in response to a suit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had sought the same records via the Freedom of Information Act.
Consumer groups back patent bill
Grant Gross, InfoWorld
Five consumer groups have given their support to legislation that would overhaul the U.S. patent system, saying the bill would create fairer penalties for infringement.
The Patent Reform Act of 2007 could come before the U.S. House of Representatives for a vote as soon as this week despite objections from some labor unions, small inventors, and some small tech vendors. The bill, backed by several large tech vendors, also found support from Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Knowledge Ecology International, Public Knowledge, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Analysis: RIAA wants universities to do its dirty work
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
The recording industry has continued to ratchet up its war against peer-to-peer file sharing, and lately it has been working overtime to draft universities into the fight...
A better solution is the one proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a recent report: instead of transforming college campuses into a miniature surveillance state, record labels and universities could enter into a collective licensing agreement under which the university would pay a flat fee to the record labels in exchange for the right to utilize peer-to-peer applications on campus.
AT&T Plaintiffs Cite McConnell Remarks
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
Plaintiffs suing AT&T in connection with the government's warrantless surveillance program this week filed a motion asking a federal appeals court in San Francisco to consider as evidence the recent admission by the government's top intelligence official that telecommunications companies aided the program...
"Taken in context, it is clear that [McConnell] is referencing the defendant telecommunications companies in this litigation" as well as dozens of other cases pending in federal court, wrote attorneys for Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action lawsuit last year on behalf of AT&T customers in California who claim that they were wiretapped.
Inside the Terrorist Screening Center
Dina Temple-Raston, NPR
To visit the Terrorist Screening Center, you have to make some promises. The first is not to divulge where the center is — aside from saying it is in a secure location in Northern Virginia. A reporter has never been allowed inside the center, and NPR was not allowed to record the analysts who work there, in case someone said something that was classified...
In 2004, the year the TSC opened its doors, it had some 5,400 hits. This year, the FBI expects to log more than 22,000.
Those kinds of numbers worry civil liberties advocates like David Sobel, the senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The bottom-line problem is the government since 9-11 has gotten into the business of making lists of suspicious people," he says. "This has happened without much discussion of the criteria or how affected people might get some recourse and get their names off if they mistakenly have been put on such a list."
Point, Click . . . Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The EFF obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act revealing the inner workings of the FBI's Digital Collection System Network (DCSNet), a software suite that allows the Bureau to conduct surveillance on a wide variety of digital devices. The documents have helped researchers analyze the security implications of the system.
Legal woes mount for TorrentSpy
Greg Sandoval , CNET News.com
Hollywood has pounded TorrentSpy this past week, winning two important court decisions against the BitTorrent search engine that could hand the movie industry some powerful new tools in its fight against illegal file sharing.
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a proponent of strong privacy laws on the Web, has criticized the court findings and claim they pose serious threats to Internet users...
Kevin Bankston, an EFF staff attorney, said Cooper misread the law.
"Essentially, one can do ongoing surveillance of another party's e-mails without their consent and not violate the law," Bankston said. "Not only does this open the door to privacy abuses in civil cases but it also could lead to abuses by the government...It's an incredibly dangerous decision."
EFF report slams RIAA lawsuit campaign, calls for flat-fee, unlimited P2P
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Four years after the RIAA launched its first lawsuits against individual file-swappers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation takes a look back at the campaign as it has unfolded so far and concludes that "suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma." So what is the answer? According to the EFF's 20-page report on the topic, it's a voluntary collective licensing regime that would let music lovers pay a few bucks a month to legally download (and keep) any songs they want.
Happy Anniversary Pirates: 20,000 Copyright Lawsuits and Counting
David Kravets, Wired News
Four years ago, the recording industry set off a legal firestorm when it sued 261 music file-swappers, a move that has reshaped the peer-to-peer, file-sharing world and revamped pirating technologies.
The legal tempest commenced September 8, 2003. Members of the Recording Industry Association of America have followed with some 20,000 similar lawsuits, legal threats and settlements, according to a report published Wednesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The lawsuits, however, are not working," according to the report by the California privacy group. "Today, downloading from P2P networks is more popular than ever, despite the widespread public awareness of lawsuits."
TorrentSpy shuts doors to America
Cade Metz, Register UK
Unwilling to compromise the privacy of its users, TorrentSpy has shut its doors to American file sharers. The move came just hours before a U.S. judge denied an appeal from the company, insisting - once again - that it turn over server logs detailing user behavior...
TorrentSpy's server logs pass through system memory, but are never permanently recorded. The company argues that saving this data would violate its privacy policy, and when Judge Chooljian's order went public, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a big-name privacy watchdog, launched a defense of its own. "We think it's a very troubling ruling that goes well beyond TorrentSpy," EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann told The Reg. "It potentially allows any company's privacy policy to be re-written by its adversary's lawyers. It's a bad precedent to set."
FBI's Wiretap Network Revealed And Request for Reader Document Analysis
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to Wired News by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
TorrentSpy to MPAA: Log this! Site blocks US searches
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy can use the site no more—at least not for now. TorrentSpy has begun to block all searches by US visitors, instead redirecting search requests to a page with the headline "TorrentSpy Acts to Protect Privacy"...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology both warned that such a decision imposed massive record-keeping burdens on practically any company that uses computers. Not only that, but Internet privacy would essentially be dead if companies were forced to hand over such information to the MPAA, RIAA, or anyone else for that matter. "A court would never think to force a company to record telephone calls, transcribe employee conversations, or log other ephemeral information," EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann said. "There is no reason why the rules should be different simply because a company uses digital technologies."
DVD Dilemma
Vince Vitrano, TMJ (NBC - Milwaukee)
New technology allows you to download your favorite shows... and even copy your movies. The big question: if you use it, are you breaking the law?...
Fred von Lohmann, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the law doesn't make sense. "There is a sense here which it prevents consumers from doing things they otherwise would be entitled to do legally."
U.S. terror database under rights scrutiny
UPI
U.S. rights groups are questioning the validity of a growing federal list of terror suspects that contains at least 235,000 names...
"This really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool," David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocacy group told the Post.
He said the numbers "suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists."
Lawyer: Spy boss undercuts security case by confirming AT&T role
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
A newspaper interview by the nation's spymaster, confirming that telecommunications companies have helped the Bush administration's clandestine surveillance program, has undermined the government's attempt to shield AT&T for its role in the effort, a lawyer for customers of the company said Thursday...
Kurt Opsahl, one of the privacy-rights lawyers representing AT&T customers in San Francisco, said Thursday that McConnell's newspaper comments contradicted the administration's legal position.
"The government has taken such an extreme position that this information is secret, a substantive part of thir argument that these cases must be dismissed," said Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The director of national intelligence candidly confirmed what had been previously asserted to be secret."
Spy Chief Torpedos Government's Lawyering in Spy Cases
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell contradicted the government and his own legal defenses of the nations' telecoms by telling an El Paso newspaper that the companies helped the government with its warrantless wiretapping program. That program ran from October 2001 to January 2006 without court supervision, but now gets special program warrants from a secret spy court...
Just last week, Justice Department lawyers tried to convince the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T because confirming or denying an NSA-AT&T relationship would compromise national security...
EFF lawyer Kurt Opsahl tells THREAT LEVEL that it comes as no surprise that the telcoms worked with the NSA given the evidence in the cases.
"What is interesting is the contrast between McConnell saying this in public and what the government says is a state secret in its court filings," Opsahl said. "It is difficult to read what he is saying as anything other than that the very telcos who are currently being sued are the ones that cooperated with the program."
1998 newsgroup posts could help EFF overturn broad patent on "virtual subdomains"
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project takes aim at another patent as the EFF and lawyer Rick Mc Leod have joined forces to request a USPTO re-examination (PDF) of an Ideaflood patent on "virtual subdomains." According to the request, the patent in question describes capabilities that had already been implemented in Apache when the patent was filed
Report: Official Army Web sites sacrificing security
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Army researchers found security violations on official service Web portals at nearly 40 times the rate of soldiers’ blogs, according to documents from a digital watchdog group released last week.
The data from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was part of the Army’s answer to a lawsuit requesting information about the Army’s tracking and troubleshooting of soldier’s personal sites...
“This shows that bloggers seem to be doing a good job keeping sensitive material off their sites,” said Marcia Hofmann, EFF attorney and spokeswoman. “It appears that where they should be focusing more attention is on their own sites.”
State looks at limiting scanning technology
Michael Gardner, Sign On San Diego
With little thought, many Californians carry wafer-thin cards containing a 15-cent silicon chip that enable them to zip through toll booths, enter parking garages and access the office...
Critics say RFID data can be obtained by lifting the identifying number literally out of someone's pocket with a remote scanner from a couple of feet away. Data bases could be accessed to match the number with other personal information. In one experiment, access cards of several legislative employees were remotely read in elevators and in hallways and cloned, providing the “thief” with access to private, secured areas.
“It sounds like science fiction, but it's quite doable,” said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for privacy rights in the digital world. “It's not paranoia if the threat is real.”
Report: Brass, Not Blogs, Have Loose Lips
Robert Weller, Associated Press
An Army investigative report found that official Army Web sites violated operational security more than military bloggers...
The report was obtained by the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), under orders from a federal district court.
The Army tightened rules on blogging by soldiers in May, requiring that they be cleared by commanders, partly because of concerns the bloggers might reveal information that would help insurgents.
Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Noah Shachtman, Wired News
According to documents released through an EFF lawsuit against the Army and Defense Department, soldier journalists post far less information that could harm military operations than official .mil websites do. These documents called into question the need for new restrictions on soldiers' online speech, which some critics fear will cause military bloggers to cut back on their posts or shut down their sites altogether.
Debate heats up on what's protected by copyright laws
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself -- a challenge to federal copyright laws...
After seeing how debate clips turned up on YouTube and blogs -- and were mashed up into parodies -- "the networks realized that you can either work with people or you can fight them," said Jason Schultz, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law in the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
"This also shows the power of popular marketing on the Internet. How word-of-mouth spread online is being recognized as a legitimate marketing tool," Schultz said.
Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Noah Shachtman, Wired News
The new documentary "War Made Easy" isn't just a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war. The 72-minute film is a media provocation itself -- a challenge to federal copyright laws...
The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity."
Judges Skeptical of State-Secrets Claim
Karl Vick, Washington Post
Lawyers for the Bush administration encountered a federal appeals court Wednesday that appeared deeply skeptical of a blanket claim that the government's surveillance efforts cannot be challenged in court because the litigation might reveal state secrets...
One suit, Hepting v. AT&T, is a class action that grew out of allegations by retired AT&T engineer Mark Klein that the company had cooperated with the National Security Agency to install equipment that funneled Internet traffic to the surveillance agency. A "secret room" described in court filings by Klein was located in an office building on Folsom Street, seven blocks from the courthouse.
U.S. Defends Surveillance to 3 Skeptical Judges
Adam Liptak, New York Times
Three federal appeals court judges hearing challenges to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs appeared skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the Bush administration’s central argument Wednesday: that national security concerns require that the lawsuits be dismissed...
In the AT&T case, the plaintiffs submitted a sworn statement from a former technician for the company who disclosed technical documents about the installation of monitoring equipment at an AT&T Internet switching center in San Francisco.
Mr. Garre, representing the administration, and Michael K. Kellogg, a lawyer for AT&T, said the sworn statement was built on speculation and inferences. Robert D. Fram, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the statement provided more than enough direct evidence to allow the case to go forward.
Classified evidence debated
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
A federal appeals court holding a high-stakes hearing Wednesday in San Francisco on President Bush's clandestine eavesdropping program appeared inclined to keep alive a lawsuit accusing AT&T of illegally letting the government intercept millions of Americans' phone calls and e-mails...
The AT&T suit, like several cases pending against other telecommunications companies, accuses the firm of giving the National Security Agency unlimited access to customers' phone calls, e-mails and message records. Plaintiffs in the AT&T case have submitted a declaration by a former company engineer who said he helped install equipment at the company's San Francisco office that would divert Internet messages to a room reserved for government-cleared employees.
Phone customers, charity challenge U.S. wiretapping
Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times
Justice Department attorneys attempted to persuade three federal appellate court judges Wednesday to dismiss two major lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's warrantless domestic-eavesdropping program...
Plaintiffs' attorney Robert Fram said his clients have powerful evidence that AT&T worked on a huge surveillance program.
Fram, a lawyer working with attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cited a sworn declaration by former AT&T employee Mark Klein, describing a supersecure room in a building in San Francisco where AT&T assembled high-powered dating-mining equipment for a "special job" for the NSA. He said he had heard from other employees that similar operations were being put together in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Seattle.
Federal ID plan raises privacy concerns
Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act...
Colorado and New Hampshire lawmakers are not alone. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation say the IDs and supporting databases -- which Chertoff said would eventually be federally interconnected -- will infringe on privacy.
EFF says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for "a wide range of surveillance activities" by government and businesses that "will be able to easily read your private information" because of the bar code required on each card.
Nation's Soul Is at Stake in NSA Surveillance Case
Jennifer Granick, Wired News
Today the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is hearing arguments on two of the most important cases in decades dealing with the rule of law and personal privacy.
The cases are Hepting v. AT&T and Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush. At stake is whether the government can immunize itself from public oversight and prosecution for illegal activities by claiming that whatever actions it took were done in the name of national security. These cases will also influence whether the government is entitled to warehouse citizen phone calls and e-mails for subsequent unsupervised searching and data mining.
Major copyright case to test First Sale Doctrine, possibly shrinkwrap EULAs
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the case of a California man who has been sued by Universal Music Group for selling promotional CDs...
In addition to responding to UMG's charges, EFF has countersued UMG for sending "takedown" letters to eBay claiming that Augustino's CDs infringed copyright. In a post on EFF's blog, von Lohmann charges that UMG has been "harassing a number of promo CD merchants, sending bogus DMCA takedown notices to eBay, getting auctions suspended, and accounts terminated." Victory in the case would make it easier for other eBay sellers to resist UMG's efforts to shut them down.
Appeals court may let NSA lawsuits proceed
Declan McCullagh , CNET News.com
A federal appeals court on Wednesday appeared unwilling to end a pair of lawsuits that claim the Bush administration engaged in widespread illegal surveillance of Americans...
n the first case, called Hepting v. AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other attorneys had filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T saying it unlawfully opened its networks to the NSA. Last summer, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco ruled that it could proceed.
Feds urge appeals court to dismiss eavesdropping lawsuits
Paul Elias, Associated Press
Government lawyers, citing national security risks, urged an appeals court Wednesday to toss out two legal challenges to a Bush administration anti-terror program that allowed government spies to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants...
Robert Fram, who represents the AT&T customers, said the best evidence that his clients' communications were intercepted comes from a former AT&T engineer who spoke to the media. The engineer said the company installed a special room with highly limited access at its San Francisco offices that contained equipment designed specifically for surveillance.
Domestic Spying Programs Under Fire In Court
Mark Matthews, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in two lawsuits brought by groups who believe they've been subjects of the government's eavesdropping.
One group, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is suing AT&T for allegedly funneling phone lines wholesale into computers, and then turning the information over to the government.
Lawsuits May Illuminate Methods of Spy Program
Dan Eggen, Washington Post
In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a "special job" by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician...
"If the courts take the position that the state-secrets privilege prevents the case from going forward, I think effectively there'll never be a decision about the legality of the program," said Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director. "I think it's tremendously important for that."
E-ZPass to Divorce
Good Morning America, ABC News
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien is featured in the video.
AT&T Tells Court That Secret Wiretapping Destroys Privacy (in 1927)
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The first time the Supreme Court heard a case about whether the government had the right to spy on Americans conversations without a warrant, AT&T filed a brief with the court arguing that such spying was inimical to democracy. That document was blogged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is now suing the nation's largest telecom for its alleged participation in warrantless dragnet spying and data-mining of Amercians' phone calls and internet use.
Video Site Veoh Sues To Stop Universal
Richard Koman , Top Tech News
Faced with saber-rattling by Universal Music Group (UMG), online video sharing network Veoh has requested a federal judge to rule that its business is protected by the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
If the courts decide against Veoh or Google and its YouTube property, the legal landscape for such Web 2.0 sites could be substantially altered. "Google has basically been following the advice of the best lawyers in Silicon Valley," Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred Von Lohmann said at the time Viacom filed its case. "If Viacom wins, that would call into doubt all of the business models that relied on the same kinds of legal advice."
AT&T Wiretapping Case Headed for Hearing
Stephen Lawson, PC World
A federal appeals court will hear arguments next Wednesday on whether to stop a class-action privacy suit that is based on allegations that the government and AT&T Inc. have been working together in an illegal wiretapping program.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the case in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco last year on behalf of Tash Hepting and other AT&T customers. The suit alleges AT&T cooperated with the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance of millions of customers' communications illegally, violating the customers' privacy.
Wiretapping Bill Puts Telcos on Hold
Massimo Calabresi, TIME
By most appearances, President Bush scored a rare and much sought-after victory last weekend...
The question will surface in coming weeks as lawyers for the government, the telecommunications companies and activist organizations face off in a California court. Next Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments as the government seeks to dismiss a case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others claiming AT&T illegally intercepted and provided to the government calls and e-mails of Americans.
Can Anyone Police File Sharing?
Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed
Campus file sharing briefly hit prominence in Congress last week as colleges lobbied against a proposed amendment in the Senate to the Higher Education Act reauthorization that would have required universities to use “technology-based” systems to try to block illegal downloading activity. While the amendment was withdrawn, it may be revived in the House — and certainly the entertainment industry has no intention of letting the issue go away...
“The response has not been to dampen students’ enthusiasm for downloading music,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is critical of lawsuits targeting online music downloaders.
Bush, Dems Deadlock Over Surveillance Program
Mark Matthews, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Summer vacations are on hold in Washington. Lawmakers are planning for a weekend of work, trying to hammer out an agreement with the White House over the terrorist surveillance program...
Cindy Cohn, EFF Legal Director: "This was really a big rush by the administration at the last minute and there are a lot of members of Congress who I think are frankly uncomfortable with voting in the dark like this."
Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom
Daniela Deane, Washington Post
Jhannet Sejas and her boyfriend were celebrating her 19th birthday by taking in a matinee showing of the hit movie "Transformers" at the theater at Ballston Common mall...
"The movie industry needs to recognize that their audience isn't the enemy," said Cindy Cohn, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that specializes in digital rights issues. "They need to stop treating their fans like criminals. . . . What they're doing is extremely unreasonable, coming down on this poor girl who was actually trying to promote their movie."
Mining MySpace
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
Most Web users will admit to having used MySpace or Facebook to spy on their teenage kids or an ex-significant other. But Stephen Patton has made social network snooping into a science...
The lesson for social networkers is to filter their MySpace postings before they hit the Web, says Kevin Bankston, a privacy attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "These kinds of tools emphasize that when users post information to Web sites, it can be collected by law enforcement or anyone else who cares," Bankston says. "You shouldn't have any illusions about the fact that you're publishing to the world."
Support for Attorney General Gonzales slips further
Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor
Seldom have a cabinet official and a Congress been so at odds. After months of bickering over fired US attorneys, congressional subpoenas, and secret eavesdropping, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now has few supporters left on Capitol Hill, even among his fellow Republicans...
"The administration has finally copped to a broader [surveillance] program," wrote Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in a July 31 analysis of recent developments in the case.
"Attempted infringement" appears in new House intellectual property bill
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Back in May, the Justice Department issued some proposed legislation to tighten US intellectual property laws and to criminalize some forms of "attempted infringement." Now, legislation based on the proposals has been introduced in Congress by Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH), complete with stiffer jail terms for violators and the controversial "attempted infringement" clause...
The bill is full of the sort of things that groups like the EFF aren't going to like, and in fact the EFF has already issued a statement condemning the legislation. One of their concerns is that a small change to the law could have big effects on casual file-sharers for a different reason: P2P users could face greater penalties for infringement after statutory damages are expanded.
The bill allows "a judge to dole out damages for each separate piece of a derivative work or compilation, rather than treating it as one work," wrote Derek Slater, "for example, copying an entire album could translate into damages for each individual track, even if the copyrights in those tracks aren't separately registered."
New bill backs prison time for piracy 'attempts'
Anne Broache, CNET News.com
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may not have a lot of pals in Congress these days, but he has nevertheless found someone willing to pursue the dramatic copyright crackdown lurking on his legislative wishlist...
Digital rights activists are already bristling at the new language, which currently has no co-sponsors. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, has argued that the bill and similar past efforts would lead to more convictions of innocent people. In a recent blog post, EFF activism coordinator said he hopes the Chabot proposal "meets the same fate as last year's DoJ proposal and is stopped dead in its tracks."
Bush Asks Congress To Expand Surveillance
CBS News
In the midst of a festering public scandal surrounding the administration's secret wiretapping program and the attorney general's efforts to have it extended, President George W. Bush is calling on Congress to expand the law governing the issuance of warrants to intelligence agencies for surveillance...
This could affect a lawsuit before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing AT&T for violating the rights of its customers by assisting the NSA with spying. The government has sought to have the suit dismissed on the grounds that state secrets would be exposed in a trial.
Audio: Uneasy Ties Bind Music Companies, Music Blogs
Joel Rose, NPR
Record labels usually frown on fans sharing music for free online, but tolerate MP3, or music, blogs. These fan-run sites have proven effective in breaking unknown indie bands. But it's a relationship that is still rocky at times, as Joel Rose of member station WHYY reports.
(Featuring EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann.)
Your Help Needed in Analyzing FBI Docs
Lisa Vaas, eWeek
Lacking something to read at the beach this summer? Problem solved: There are 1,138 pages detailing FBI activity that need to be pored over by good citizens so as to ferret out abuse of power.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has requested that people "dive into the docs," all of which are freely downloadable, with searchable text, from the nonprofit group's Web site.
Judge won't dismiss states' wiretap suits
Paul Elias, Associated Press
A federal judge declined to dismiss lawsuits filed by Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, and two other states seeking information on a warrantless wiretap program run by the federal government. The decision keeps the cases alive, pending an appeals court decision...
Cindy Cohn, chief lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that will argue the case against the government in the appeals court, said yesterday's ruling was "significant because the government wanted to kill these cases and the judge refused."
YouTube User Puts Legal Lash to Universal
Nicholas Carlson , InternetNews
Now it's the copyright holders getting taken to court.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit today against Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), asking a federal court to protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son on the Internet.
Senators to abandon '08 e-voting paper trail mandate
Anne Broache, CNET News.com
Democratic senators on Wednesday made another push for banning electronic voting machines that lack paper trails, but they've backed away from doing so in time for next year's presidential election...
In some ways, the Senate effort resembles a bill approved by a House of Representatives panel in May. Election officials have criticized that bill as setting forth unrealistic requirements, insufficient funding and impossible timetables--including implementation, with some exceptions, by next year's elections. But advocacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say it is an important step toward creating more open, transparent elections.
Universal demands takedown of homemade dancing toddler clip; EFF sues
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
A 29-second video clip of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" is the subject of a new court complaint against Universal Music Publishing Group, which demanded that the clip be removed from YouTube in early June. Apparently, the company believes that a few seconds of music blasting from a background stereo infringes on its copyright, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation disagrees. The EFF filed suit against Universal yesterday, alleging that the music in the clip was "self-evident non-infringing fair use."
EFF Takes Universal To Court Over DMCA Issues
Terrence Russell, Wired News
Not since that annoying Ally McBeal baby has a dancing toddler caused so much commotion. All it took was Stephanie Lenz uploading a 29 second clip of her son rocking out to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" on YouTube and now Universal Music Publishing Group is up in arms. The worst of it came last month as YouTube removed the clip in compliance with their own DMCA policy after Universal's official request.
Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that they are filing suit against the music giant with the intent to "protect the fair use and free speech rights of a mother who posted a short video of her toddler son dancing to a Prince song on the Internet."
EULA: What Are You Signing Away?
Andrew K. Burger, E-Commerce Times
Software developers and vendors have used standard contracts to protect themselves, their products and services, and to set the terms of agreements with customers. However, in doing so they often set legally binding terms and conditions that consumer advocacy groups would argue overstep the bounds of what should be expected or permissible...
EULAs have been used "to require users to sign away their fair use rights, such as the right to reverse engineer," Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Corynne McSherry told the E-Commerce Times. "Essentially, companies are using contract law to trump basic IP (Internet protocol) protections for users -- often without users' knowledge."
Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations
John Solomon, Washington Post
As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005...
Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports.
Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations
John Solomon, Washington Post
On April 27, 2005, Attorney General Gonzales assured Congress that "there has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse" as a result o the PATRIOT Act. An EFF lawsuit against the Department Of Justice revealed that just six days before he made this statment to Congress, Gonzales had been copied on a communication to a presidential oversight board reporting improper use of a National Security Letter by the FBI. This incident helped to prompt an internal Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales has made false or misleading testimony before Congress.
Spoon-altering psychic has copyright advocates bent out of shape
Paul Elias, Associated Press
Uri Geller became a 1970s superstar and made millions with an act that included bending spoons, seemingly through the power of his own mind...
"All it takes is a single e-mail to completely censor someone on the Internet," said Jason Schultz, a lawyer for the online civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing Geller over an unflattering clip posted on YouTube for which he claimed a copyright ownership.
Imagine There's No DRM... I Wonder if You Can
Tekla S. Perry, IEEE Spectrum
Digital rights management, the group of technologies that control copying and use of digital media downloads and disks, has infuriated consumers since its inception in the mid-1990s...
If the industry moves in the direction of lifting DRM and “we end up in a world in which music is sold in an unrestricted format as a default, we have the world we want to live in,” says Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a consumer advocacy organization.
Hollywood hates pirates, but can it use them?
Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
Attorney Nancy Prager sees only thievery in file sharing. Don't even try to suggest anything otherwise to her...
"File sharing has been going on for years now and yet the movie industry continues to see record profits and revenues," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users. "Clearly file sharing is not killing the movie industry, far from it."
More Evil Than Google?
Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com
No matter how many times Google chants its "Don't be evil" mantra, its critics just won't disappear...
So is it fair to hold a double standard for Google and other search companies? Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that it is: Because of the company's unprecedented dominance of the search industry and its massive data collection, he says that a little evil from Google goes a long way.
"Google gets the most press because it's the biggest, and that's fair," Opsahl says. "Every decision they make has so much impact."
File-sharing 'graveyard' still filling up
Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
To some, these were corporate executions, death by litigation. LokiTorrent, Scour, SuperNova.org, Aimster and the original Napster were just a few of those sued out of existence, the victims of the entertainment industry's fear of technology, say the companies' supporters.
"The Internet's graveyard is deep with companies that have been sued out of business by the entertainment industry," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for the rights of Internet users. "I think the prevailing sense is that they are winning the battles but losing the war. Despite the lawsuits, there is more file sharing than ever."
WIPO broadcast treaty defeated by web activists
OUT-LAW News
A controversial new intellectual property right due to be created by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has been successfully opposed by a coalition of web activists and the technology industry...
Gwen Hinze is the international affairs director for the EFF. She told weekly technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio about the opposition to the plans.
"If you create a new layer of rights that sit on top of copyright from a consumer's point of view that raises questions about access to information, so information that might otherwise be in the public domain as a matter of copyright law, the exceptions and limitations wouldn't apply and that raises some concerns about access to knowledge," said Hinze.
Sunday begins a new era for cable subscribers
David Lieberman, USA TODAY
The summer's just started, yet cable operators are already drenched in sweat.
They are bracing for a deadline they staved off for more than a decade — one that could bring a wave of new TV viewing options for many of the 65.6 million homes connected to cable...
What's more, media activists including the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation told the FCC this month that having CableLabs approve equipment "limits competition and locks out flexible and innovative features from consumers."
Google seeks help
Associated Press
Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google Inc. is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide...
Governments "are having more success than the more idealistic of us thought," acknowledges Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
EFF and CDT: Torrentspy decision could spell end of Internet privacy
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Could one judge's decision in a copyright case broadly rewrite US laws governing legal discovery? The EFF and the Center for Democracy & Technology are both warning that a recent legal decision could eliminate privacy on the Internet and impose massive record-keeping burdens on any company that uses computers.
Just An Online Minute... The Suit That Might KO Online Privacy
Wendy Davis, MediaPost
Some civil rights advocates are worried that a pending copyright lawsuit brought by major entertainment studios against operators of the peer-to-peer site www.torrentspy.com could eviscerate online privacy.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now stepped into the case, arguing that if the studios get their way, people will no longer be able to browse the Web in relative anonymity.
DOJ asks federal court to block state probes of NSA domestic spying
Michael Sung, Jurist
he US Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal district judge Thursday to block New Jersey, Vermont, Maine, Missouri, and Connecticut from investigating potential violations of state consumer privacy laws in the controversial warrantless domestic surveillance program, arguing that the state secrets privilege doctrine bars the state governments from subpoenaing ten telecommunication companies to determine what information they passed onto the National Security Agency (NSA)...
Walker is also currently presiding over a class action lawsuit challenging the legality of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the class action against AT&T in January 2006, alleging that the company had unlawfully provided the NSA with access to its facilities and resources to unconstitutionally spy on "millions of ordinary Americans."
What's in a Laptop? Court Ponders Legality of Border Searches
Ryan Singel, Wired news
Is your laptop a fancy piece of luggage or an extension of your mind? That's the central question facing a federal appeals court in a case that could sharply limit the government's ability to snoop into laptop computers carried across the border by American citizens...
Lahue has support from the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The two groups submitted a friend-of-the-court brief Tuesday arguing that suspicionless searches of laptops are overly invasive, and that prior to the California ruling, the government had no limits on what it could do when it seizes a laptop and makes a copy of the hard drive.
Debate Over Laptop Seizures Heats Up
K.C. Jones, InformationWeek
The question as to whether border agents and investigators have the right to snoop through travelers' laptops as they enter the United States is stirring up even more controversy...
The Association of Corporate Travel Executives disagrees. It filed an amicus brief in the case this week.
"Over the past several years, U.S. customs agents have been searching and even seizing travelers' laptops when they are entering or leaving the country if the traveler fits a profile, appears on a government watch list, or is chosen for a random inspection," the group said in a joint statement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The Supreme Court has ruled that customs and border agents may perform routine searches at the border without a warrant or even reasonable suspicion, but EFF and ACTE argue that inspections of computers are far more invasive than flipping through a briefcase."
EFF sides with TorrentSpy in MPAA lawsuit
Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
As expected, the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a friends-of-the-court brief in support of TorrentSpy, the search engine accused of copyright violations...
Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with EFF, which advocates for the rights of Internet users, said the group has notified representatives from TorrentSpy and the motion picture studios of their intent to file an amicus brief that argues for a reversal of the judge's decision.
He added that EFF is also looking for others to join them on the brief.
"This is the first time the court has found that information found only in RAM is subject to preservation," von Lohmann said. "Companies may be obliged to begin logging and producing information about conversations that occur on digital phones, which are stored on RAM. Nobody is asked to preserve records for analog phone conversations."
EFF wins 4th Amendment email victory
Richi Jennings, ComputerWorld
The "wow" starts with Wednesday's IT Blogwatch: in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation wins against warrentless U.S. email snooping.
King for A Never-Ending War
Wired news
We are kings. You can't touch us.
That's the essence the government's most recent reply brief in the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in helping the NSA wiretap sans warrant the emails and phone calls of Americans.
Want Off Street View? Google Wants Your ID and a Sworn Statement
Kevin Poulsen, Wired news
EFF privacy advocate and unhappy Street View model Kevin Bankston made good on his vow to try out Google's take-down policy after THREAT LEVEL found a picture of his unwitting mug stalking the sidewalks near EFF's offices. What he learned: Google is happy to remove you from Street View ... provided you give them a wealth of additional information, including a photo of your driver's license.
Audio: Google's Street View captures image of privacy critic
Jon Gordon, NPR: Future Tense
The new Street View feature of Google Maps provides 360 degree panoramic street-level views of New York City, San Francisco, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas...
Kevin Bankston, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has emerged as a top critic of Street View. It turns out that Street View captured Bankston walking to work while smoking a cigarette. What's more, this isn't the first time the privacy crusader has been captured by street-mapping cameras.
Google's Street View Upsets Privacy Advocates
JOSH GERSTEIN, New York Sun
Google's new Street View service, which allows users to pull up street-level, 360-degree photos of addresses in major urban areas, is cool and more than a little creepy, but is it legal?...
Legal experts say there is no hard-and-fast legal rule that blesses all public photography. "Privacy laws vary from state to state, but there have been instances where legal liability was found even for photos taken in public," an attorney urging changes to Street View, Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
EFF lawyer is smokin' on Google Street View
Dan Goodin, Register
Google's Street View service is barely two weeks old and it's already attracted plenty of criticism from privacy advocates...
Now we've found yet another compelling reason to knit our brows, this time provided by Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. By comparison his adventure with Street View is mild. An eagle-eyed reporter for Wired News spotted him in San Francisco's Mission District drawing on a cigarette as he walked to work. It was ironic, because Bankston, a critic of these types of things, was captured smoking on Amazon.com's now defunct A9 service a few years ago.
Google Maps: An Invasion of Privacy?
S. JAMES SNYDER, Time
Is that man breaking into an apartment building? Does that tollbooth operator realize she's being photographed? And isn't it illegal to have cameras in New York's Brooklyn Battery tunnel?...
"There is a serious tension here, between the concepts of free speech, and open information, and the idea of privacy," says Kevin Bankston, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation." There's definitely a privacy concern that an unmarked Google camera van can, and in fact has, captured images of people, whether in the street or in their homes, in a manner that could be embarrassing or even dangerous to them." He adds: "We don't think what Google's done here is necessarily illegal, though a few images may cross the line and may create liability. It's more that they've done something that's really irresponsible and rude to people."
MPAA accuses TorrentSpy of concealing evidence
Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
The movie studios may have discovered a new and powerful weapon in their war on copyright infringement...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the judge's decision "troubling" and said it could mean that any Web site operator could be compelled to log user activity anytime they faced a lawsuit.
EFF Privacy Advocate Sighted in Google Street View
Kevin Poulsen, Wired news
It's official. Every new street level map view service has to capture an image of EFF staff attorney Kevin Bankston sneaking a cigarette.
Amazon's now-defunct A9 service first nailed Bankston outside EFF's San Francisco office a few years ago. He'd been trying conceal his smoking from his family.
Video: "Street View:" Inventive Or Invasive?
CBS Evening News
Google photographed the streets of five cities — New York, San Francisco, Denver, Miami and Las Vegas — with a special 360-degree camera mounted on a van.
The snapshots range from amazingly detailed to boringly mundane. It's a great tool for tourists or home-sick transplants, but privacy advocate Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Google is being too invasive.
Consumer groups back cable company in networked DVR spat
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
The EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Democracy & Technology don't often find themselves arguing on behalf of of large cable companies, but the three groups recently joined forces to defend Cablevision's networked DVR.
Some say spyware bill too broad, others say too weak
Grant Gross, InfoWorld
An antispyware bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives this week faces opposition from several groups with one side saying it's too strong and the other saying it's too weak...
Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has raised different objections to the SPY ACT. The bill would preempt about 10 state laws that have been passed, many of them stronger than the SPY ACT, said Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property lawyer for the EFF.
In addition, the bill would take away the ability of private citizens to sue spyware creators, von Lohmann said.
The bill "would actually make things worse, insulating adware vendors from more stringent state laws and private lawsuits," von Lohmann wrote on the EFF blog in April.
Op-Ed: Copyright Silliness on Campus
Fred von Lohmann, Washington Post
What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren't expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.
An 'All You Can Eat' Approach to Fighting Piracy
Brock Read, The Chonicle of Higher Education
Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has looked over the questionnaire on illegal file sharing that Congress sent to 19 colleges last month. And, as he makes clear in a Washington Post opinion piece, he’s not impressed.
Concerns Emerge Over iTunes User Data
May Wong, Associated Press
Apple Inc.'s recent rollout of songs without copy protection software at its iTunes Store has given consumers new flexibility, but questions have emerged over the company's inclusion of personal data in purchased music tracks...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which also analyzed the DRM-free song files on iTunes, said it did not want to jump to any conclusions on Apple's reasons for embedding the personal data...
"It just seems careless and unwise for somebody like Apple to start planting this kind of personal information without protection in the files," von Lohmann said. "It's not as bad as leaking your credit card number or your Social Security number, but it's still a pretty careless security leak."
The copyright buzz from the 'Electric Slide'
Daniel Terdiman, CNET News.com
The "Electric Slide" now has a Creative Commons license...
On May 22, Silver and the EFF announced that they had come to an arrangement: the EFF agreed to drop its lawsuit, and in return, Silver said he would no longer pursue DMCA claims against anyone portraying his dance steps in a noncommercial manner.
Apple criticized for embedding names, e-mails in songs
Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
It used to be that music fans believed cryptic messages about Satan or the death of a band member were hidden within rock albums.
Nowadays, the secrets buried in digital music are way too easy to find, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The consumer watchdog group, which focuses on the Web, is taking issue with Apple's practice of embedding customer information within iTunes music.
Apple includes customer names and e-mail addresses within song files purchased from iTunes, according to Fred von Lohmann, an EFF attorney. Several tech blogs wrote about the embedded information this week after Apple launched iTunes Plus, a service that features music stripped of controversial copy-protection software.
EFF: DRM-free iTunes files carry 'more than just names and e-mail addresses'
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
The morning during/after the launch of iTunes Plus yesterday was a rough one for the iTunes Store, but users were generally pleased with their newfound freedom. Or so they thought...
Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation picked up on this newfound information about the embedded personal data and investigated a bit further. As it turns out, the DRM-free AAC files from iTunes contain more than just names and e-mail addresses. While they decoded some DRM-free AAC files to PCM/WAV and found that there isn't a watermark in the compressed audio signal, there are "surprisingly huge differences" in the encoded files. "Much bigger differences than just different tags, or even different signed/encrypted tags," the EFF wrote.
Cameras everywhere, even in online maps
Elinor Mills, CNET
Kevin Bankston, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was surprised to see his face in a street-level image on a now defunct online map a few years ago...
"It is irresponsible for Google to debut a product like this without also debuting technological measures that would obscure the identities of people photographed by this product," he said. "If the Google van happened by your house at the right moment it could even capture you in an embarrassing state of undress, as you close your blinds, for example."
Personal indiscretions aside, the larger concern is for people entering and leaving places like domestic violence shelters, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, fertility clinics and controversial religious or political events, Bankston said.
Cameras everywhere, even in online maps
Elinor Mills, CNET
Kevin Bankston, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was surprised to see his face in a street-level image on a now defunct online map a few years ago...
"It is irresponsible for Google to debut a product like this without also debuting technological measures that would obscure the identities of people photographed by this product," he said. "If the Google van happened by your house at the right moment it could even capture you in an embarrassing state of undress, as you close your blinds, for example."
Personal indiscretions aside, the larger concern is for people entering and leaving places like domestic violence shelters, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, fertility clinics and controversial religious or political events, Bankston said.
Social Mapping Firms Track Cellphone Users
Sue Kwon, CBS 5 (San Francisco)
It's a common question asked among friends: "Where are you?"
Sam Altman decided to answer that question with social mapping technology...
While both services offer ways to turn off location tracking, what concerns Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kevin Bankston is how information on your whereabouts could be used against you in the future.
"In a legal case government or civil litigants could serve a subpeona and demand you hand over the history of everywhere you've been," said Bankston.
The Patent Puzzle
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, eWeek
Patent fights are fights about money. The secondary issue, the one that makes the headlines, is control. To really understand what's going on in the current patent posturing involving Microsoft, Novell, and a host of open-source companies and groups, it helps to keep those factors firmly in mind...
At one time, Novell was seen by many, thanks to its patent partnership with Microsoft, as being at least partly on Microsoft's side in the patent debate. Novell has always denied this. The recent publication of the bulk of the companies' patent agreement seems to support Novell's position. In addition, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined forces on May 23 seeking to reform software patent law and attack patents that impose particularly heavy burdens on software developers by identifying prior art that can be used to invalidate such patents.
Social Mapping Firms Track Cellphone Users
Sue Kwon, CBS 5 (San Francisco)
It's a common question asked among friends: "Where are you?"
Sam Altman decided to answer that question with social mapping technology...
While both services offer ways to turn off location tracking, what concerns Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kevin Bankston is how information on your whereabouts could be used against you in the future.
"In a legal case government or civil litigants could serve a subpeona and demand you hand over the history of everywhere you've been," said Bankston.
The Patent Puzzle
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, eWeek
Patent fights are fights about money. The secondary issue, the one that makes the headlines, is control. To really understand what's going on in the current patent posturing involving Microsoft, Novell, and a host of open-source companies and groups, it helps to keep those factors firmly in mind...
At one time, Novell was seen by many, thanks to its patent partnership with Microsoft, as being at least partly on Microsoft's side in the patent debate. Novell has always denied this. The recent publication of the bulk of the companies' patent agreement seems to support Novell's position. In addition, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined forces on May 23 seeking to reform software patent law and attack patents that impose particularly heavy burdens on software developers by identifying prior art that can be used to invalidate such patents.
Novell: la riforma dei brevetti software passa di qui.....
Data Manager Online
Novell annuncia la propria collaborazione con l'Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) per la "Riforma dei brevetti software", con l'obiettivo di cercare di influenzare governi locali e organizzazioni nazionali e internazionali perch? sviluppino legislazioni e politiche che promuovano l'innovazione.
Novell: la riforma dei brevetti software passa di qui.....
Data Manager Online
Novell annuncia la propria collaborazione con l'Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) per la "Riforma dei brevetti software", con l'obiettivo di cercare di influenzare governi locali e organizzazioni nazionali e internazionali perch? sviluppino legislazioni e politiche che promuovano l'innovazione.
Novell joins EFF for patent reform
Stephen Shankland, CNET
Facing criticism for its patent pact with Microsoft, Novell on Wednesday said it's supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation's effort to challenge what it believes are bogus patents...
"Novell is supporting us to ensure patents aren't going to hurt innovation," said Shari Steele, EFF's executive director. In particular, "Novell is now sponsoring us to ... export our patent-busting program to Europe," where EFF will hire legal representation, she said.
Novell joins EFF for patent reform
Stephen Shankland, CNET
Facing criticism for its patent pact with Microsoft, Novell on Wednesday said it's supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation's effort to challenge what it believes are bogus patents...
"Novell is supporting us to ensure patents aren't going to hurt innovation," said Shari Steele, EFF's executive director. In particular, "Novell is now sponsoring us to ... export our patent-busting program to Europe," where EFF will hire legal representation, she said.
Copy-Protection Game Changes From Whac-A-Mole to Keep Away
Mathew Honan, Wired News
You could hardly have asked for a clearer demonstration of the futility of copy protection than the events of the past three weeks. The DVD-encryption key that sparked a user rebellion on Digg in early May is now largely moot. Despite having been posted to hundreds of thousands of websites and garnering attention worldwide, the key is now useless, because the industry group that oversees HD DVD and Blu-ray copy protection has changed its encryption scheme to use a different one...
"It apparently was highly controversial (for the AACS Licensing Administrator) to send the legal threat letters," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I assume they would need to have consensus before they could step up to any lawsuits. And, in any event, it's too late for this key -- it's been immortalized as an internet celebrity thanks to the first legal threats, and will likely outlive all of us, no matter how many lawsuits are brought."
15 it-myter granskas - s? h?r ligger det till!
Mats L?vgren, PC for Alla
Om du laddar ned filer fr?n ett fildelningsn?tverk, ?r det s?kert att upphovsr?ttsorganisationerna kan identifiera dig? Eller br?nner bilder fast p? plasma-tv-apparater om de st?r p? f?r l?nge? H?r ?r sanningen bakom 15 av de vanligaste it-myterna.
Det g?r det sv?rare att identifiera person ifr?ga, konstaterar Peter Ecksley, tekniker p? Electronic Frontier Foundation. Att lita p? att en dynamisk ip-adress ska h?lla dig dold ?r dock l?nl?st eftersom internetoperat?rerna loggar vem som har haft en viss adress vid en viss tidpunkt.
Novell signs on to EFF patent busting project
Eric Bangeman, Ars Technica
In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization. May 23, 2007 Infoworld Novell and EFF team on patent reform Paul Roberts
Copy-Protection Game Changes From Whac-A-Mole to Keep Away
Mathew Honan, Wired News
You could hardly have asked for a clearer demonstration of the futility of copy protection than the events of the past three weeks. The DVD-encryption key that sparked a user rebellion on Digg in early May is now largely moot. Despite having been posted to hundreds of thousands of websites and garnering attention worldwide, the key is now useless, because the industry group that oversees HD DVD and Blu-ray copy protection has changed its encryption scheme to use a different one...
"It apparently was highly controversial (for the AACS Licensing Administrator) to send the legal threat letters," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I assume they would need to have consensus before they could step up to any lawsuits. And, in any event, it's too late for this key -- it's been immortalized as an internet celebrity thanks to the first legal threats, and will likely outlive all of us, no matter how many lawsuits are brought."
15 it-myter granskas - s? h?r ligger det till!
Mats L?vgren, PC for Alla
Om du laddar ned filer fr?n ett fildelningsn?tverk, ?r det s?kert att upphovsr?ttsorganisationerna kan identifiera dig? Eller br?nner bilder fast p? plasma-tv-apparater om de st?r p? f?r l?nge? H?r ?r sanningen bakom 15 av de vanligaste it-myterna.
Det g?r det sv?rare att identifiera person ifr?ga, konstaterar Peter Ecksley, tekniker p? Electronic Frontier Foundation. Att lita p? att en dynamisk ip-adress ska h?lla dig dold ?r dock l?nl?st eftersom internetoperat?rerna loggar vem som har haft en viss adress vid en viss tidpunkt.
Novell signs on to EFF patent busting project
Eric Bangeman In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization. May 23, 2007 Infoworld Novell and EFF team on patent reform Paul Roberts, Ars Technica
Fresh off a stinging round of criticism at the Open Source Business Conference for its licensing deal with Microsoft, Novell Inc. made an effort to change the discussion today, announcing a deal with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to reform patents worldwide.
"EFF has long been at the forefront in addressing the key challenges of the digital age, including worldwide intellectual property issues," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "The support of Novell - a company founded on the proprietary software development model but now strongly embracing the open source approach - will be a great boon to our efforts to rid the industry of innovation-killing patents. We hope Novell's example encourages other software vendors to join the effort."
Support In US For WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Appears To Wane
Drew Clark, Intellectual Property Watch
Practically no one participating in a recent government forum here liked the proposed broadcaster protection treaty under negotiation at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva...
"None of the concerns that we have raised at previous [forums] have been removed, or even addressed by the non-paper," said Gwen Hinze, international affairs director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hinze said the exclusive rights framework is inappropriate and conflicts with US law. She asked for an analysis by the US government about how the treaty, if adopted, could be embodied in US law. Hinze also raised concerns about Article 9 of the draft, as well as its interaction with Article 3 (scope of protection) and Article 7 (the exclusive right to retransmission of broadcasts).
Support In US For WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Appears To Wane
Drew Clark, Intellectual Property Watch
Practically no one participating in a recent government forum here liked the proposed broadcaster protection treaty under negotiation at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva...
"None of the concerns that we have raised at previous [forums] have been removed, or even addressed by the non-paper," said Gwen Hinze, international affairs director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hinze said the exclusive rights framework is inappropriate and conflicts with US law. She asked for an analysis by the US government about how the treaty, if adopted, could be embodied in US law. Hinze also raised concerns about Article 9 of the draft, as well as its interaction with Article 3 (scope of protection) and Article 7 (the exclusive right to retransmission of broadcasts).
Customs Breaks Privacy Laws in Data Collection, GAO Says
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
The Department of Homeland Security is breaking privacy laws by failing to tell the public all the ways it uses personal information to target passengers boarding flights entering or leaving the United States, according to a draft government report...
When government officials will not discuss what the uses and data sources are, it is hard to know whether travelers have been harmed by the screening program, said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which in December sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act for disclosure on the Automated Targeting System, which Customs uses to screen for high-risk travelers.
Disgraced Attorney General Wants to Criminalize Attempted Copyright Infringement
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired
Not content to advocate the torture of enemy combatants, the wiretapping of American citizens, and the firing of US attorneys for political reasons, 13-year Bush lapdog Alberto Gonzalez has a new cause: jailing citizens who attempt to infringe copyright and seizing their property...
According to Corynne McSherry, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "It's not totally clear what would count as attempting copyright infringement," so everything from searching for music on peer-to-peer networks to posting music on an MP3 blog could be targeted.
Google Wins Infringement Appeal
Stuart J. Johnston, Internetnews.com
A federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday that Google did not infringe the copyrights of an adult photo publisher by displaying thumbnails of proprietary pictures in its image search engine...
The appeals court found that the thumbnails did not infringe Perfect 10's copyrights because they were "highly transformative" -- that is significantly different than the full-sized images -- and thus fit into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) "fair use" exception.
The term defines situations wherein a copyrighted work, or portions of it, can be legally used in a highly modified fashion without infringing the original copyright owner's rights - a classic example is a parody, Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told internetnews.com. (The EFF filed a friend of the court brief in the case in support of Google).
Customs Breaks Privacy Laws in Data Collection, GAO Says
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
The Department of Homeland Security is breaking privacy laws by failing to tell the public all the ways it uses personal information to target passengers boarding flights entering or leaving the United States, according to a draft government report...
When government officials will not discuss what the uses and data sources are, it is hard to know whether travelers have been harmed by the screening program, said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which in December sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act for disclosure on the Automated Targeting System, which Customs uses to screen for high-risk travelers.
Disgraced Attorney General Wants to Criminalize Attempted Copyright Infringement
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired
Not content to advocate the torture of enemy combatants, the wiretapping of American citizens, and the firing of US attorneys for political reasons, 13-year Bush lapdog Alberto Gonzalez has a new cause: jailing citizens who attempt to infringe copyright and seizing their property...
According to Corynne McSherry, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "It's not totally clear what would count as attempting copyright infringement," so everything from searching for music on peer-to-peer networks to posting music on an MP3 blog could be targeted.
Google Wins Infringement Appeal
Stuart J. Johnston, Internetnews.com
A federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday that Google did not infringe the copyrights of an adult photo publisher by displaying thumbnails of proprietary pictures in its image search engine...
The appeals court found that the thumbnails did not infringe Perfect 10's copyrights because they were "highly transformative" -- that is significantly different than the full-sized images -- and thus fit into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) "fair use" exception.
The term defines situations wherein a copyrighted work, or portions of it, can be legally used in a highly modified fashion without infringing the original copyright owner's rights - a classic example is a parody, Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told internetnews.com. (The EFF filed a friend of the court brief in the case in support of Google).
Blogger Michelle Malkin Wins Copyright Fight
Technology Daily
Universal Music Group has abandoned its attempt to silence syndicated conservative columnist Michelle Malkin for her online criticism of one of the label's controversial artists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday...
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl called the label's copyright claim "bogus" and said the company misused a 2001 copyright law. "Shame on any copyright holder who would attempt to use the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] to intimidate and silence critics," Malkin said in a statement.
Search Firm Tosses The Cookies
Pete Barlas, Investor's Business Daily
Hakia says a "cookie"-free diet will give it some heft in the Web search field...
Hakia has won at least one important fan. He's Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer watchdog group.
"(Hakia's) system is really much better than the major search engines," Eckersley said.
Blogger Michelle Malkin Wins Copyright Fight
Technology Daily
Universal Music Group has abandoned its attempt to silence syndicated conservative columnist Michelle Malkin for her online criticism of one of the label's controversial artists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday...
EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl called the label's copyright claim "bogus" and said the company misused a 2001 copyright law. "Shame on any copyright holder who would attempt to use the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] to intimidate and silence critics," Malkin said in a statement.
Search Firm Tosses The Cookies
Pete Barlas, Investor's Business Daily
Hakia says a "cookie"-free diet will give it some heft in the Web search field...
Hakia has won at least one important fan. He's Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a consumer watchdog group.
"(Hakia's) system is really much better than the major search engines," Eckersley said.
State police again seek free access to records
Bruce Landis, Providence Journal
The state police have again drawn fire from privacy advocates by seeking legislation that would let them obtain Rhode Islanders' telephone and Internet records without a warrant or other review by the courts...
"It speaks directly to 'local and long-distance connection records,' " said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to free speech, privacy and other individual rights. That "clearly would reach phone records."
MySpace Automates Copyright Takedown Process
Scott Gilbertson, Wired News
MySpace announced Friday that it has rolled out a new technology to fight copyright infringement on the site. The new copyright protection system, aptly titled "Take Down Stay Down," uses technology from Audible Magic to ensure that content which has already been pulled from MySpace profiles is not re-posted...
Because the system lacks a human oversight, the Electronic Frontier Foundation worries that some perfectly legal content may end up blocked as well.
Corynne McSherry, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, tells CNet, "with every form of digital rights management that we've ever seen, it always gets hacked eventually, so I think it's likely that eventually this too will be hacked."
Victory: UMG & YouTube retreat
Michelle Malkin, Hot Air with Michelle Malkin
The Hot Air video report on Akon that Universal Music Group didn't want you to see is now back up on YouTube. That's right. The music giant and the video-sharing site (who happen to be "strategic partners") have backed down...
EFF's senior staff attorney, Kurt Opsahl, pressed YouTube for an explanation. On Friday, after Opsahl took the matter to one of Google/YouTube's in-house counsels, YouTube reinstated the video-over-ruling the prior terms of use decision.
State police again seek free access to records
Bruce Landis, Providence Journal
The state police have again drawn fire from privacy advocates by seeking legislation that would let them obtain Rhode Islanders' telephone and Internet records without a warrant or other review by the courts...
"It speaks directly to 'local and long-distance connection records,' " said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to free speech, privacy and other individual rights. That "clearly would reach phone records."
MySpace Automates Copyright Takedown Process
Scott Gilbertson, Wired News
MySpace announced Friday that it has rolled out a new technology to fight copyright infringement on the site. The new copyright protection system, aptly titled "Take Down Stay Down," uses technology from Audible Magic to ensure that content which has already been pulled from MySpace profiles is not re-posted...
Because the system lacks a human oversight, the Electronic Frontier Foundation worries that some perfectly legal content may end up blocked as well.
Corynne McSherry, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, tells CNet, "with every form of digital rights management that we've ever seen, it always gets hacked eventually, so I think it's likely that eventually this too will be hacked."
Victory: UMG & YouTube retreat
Michelle Malkin, Hot Air with Michelle Malkin
The Hot Air video report on Akon that Universal Music Group didn't want you to see is now back up on YouTube. That's right. The music giant and the video-sharing site (who happen to be "strategic partners") have backed down...
EFF's senior staff attorney, Kurt Opsahl, pressed YouTube for an explanation. On Friday, after Opsahl took the matter to one of Google/YouTube's in-house counsels, YouTube reinstated the video-over-ruling the prior terms of use decision.
MySpace adds new anti-piracy feature
Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News
MySpace and Dailymotion, a popular French video site, announced Friday separate initiatives to prevent copyrighted material from being misused, increasing pressure on Google to more aggressively police its YouTube subsidiary...
Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates for digital rights, said the problem with the feature is that it doesn't allow for "fair use," a legal concept that gives ordinary people the right to quote from books, cite newspaper articles and sing their favorite songs without seeking prior authorization.
"Fair use means you don't have to ask permission," McSherry said.
McSherry said she was also concerned about what would happen if a take-down request was disputed. "In that case it seems that further human review would be appropriate," McSherry said.
MySpace adds new anti-piracy feature
Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News
MySpace and Dailymotion, a popular French video site, announced Friday separate initiatives to prevent copyrighted material from being misused, increasing pressure on Google to more aggressively police its YouTube subsidiary...
Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates for digital rights, said the problem with the feature is that it doesn't allow for "fair use," a legal concept that gives ordinary people the right to quote from books, cite newspaper articles and sing their favorite songs without seeking prior authorization.
"Fair use means you don't have to ask permission," McSherry said.
McSherry said she was also concerned about what would happen if a take-down request was disputed. "In that case it seems that further human review would be appropriate," McSherry said.
The Streisand Effect
Andy Greenberg, Forbes
A Web user and his information are like a grizzly and her cub. Come between them, and you're likely to get mauled...
"The Web," Bankston says, "is like the mythical Hydra. Cut off one of its many heads, and two will grow back in its place."
YouTube Caught In Malkin, EFF, UMG Crossfire
Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews
Conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin is crying foul after a music industry DMCA notice quieted her criticism of Hip Hop artist Akon...
Between Malkin and UMG is a hard enough spot to be in, but add the EFF into the melee and you've got yourself a first class nightmare. The EFF called UMG's actions an "improper attempt to silence her online criticism of one of its artists."
Electronic Frontier Foundation sues Uri Geller
Associated Press
An online civil liberties group has sued self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller for using "baseless copyright claims" to silence critics who question his paranormal powers.
The suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation came after Geller, the Israeli television star who claims to bend spoons by mental forces, sued critic Brian Sapient in federal court on Monday after Sapient published an excerpt of copyrighted material on the video-sharing site, YouTube.
The Streisand Effect
Andy Greenberg, Forbes
A Web user and his information are like a grizzly and her cub. Come between them, and you're likely to get mauled...
"The Web," Bankston says, "is like the mythical Hydra. Cut off one of its many heads, and two will grow back in its place."
YouTube Caught In Malkin, EFF, UMG Crossfire
Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews
Conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin is crying foul after a music industry DMCA notice quieted her criticism of Hip Hop artist Akon...
Between Malkin and UMG is a hard enough spot to be in, but add the EFF into the melee and you've got yourself a first class nightmare. The EFF called UMG's actions an "improper attempt to silence her online criticism of one of its artists."
Electronic Frontier Foundation sues Uri Geller
Associated Press
An online civil liberties group has sued self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller for using "baseless copyright claims" to silence critics who question his paranormal powers.
The suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation came after Geller, the Israeli television star who claims to bend spoons by mental forces, sued critic Brian Sapient in federal court on Monday after Sapient published an excerpt of copyrighted material on the video-sharing site, YouTube.
Psychic fighting YouTube clips sued by SF group
Jim Herron Zamora, San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation this week jumped into a legal battle involving efforts by self-described psychic Uri Geller - who is famous for claiming to bend spoons by mental forces -- to censor video clips of him posted on YouTube...
"Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law," said foundation attorney Marcia Hoffman. "If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use -- it's as simple as that."
Psychic fighting YouTube clips sued by SF group
Jim Herron Zamora, San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation this week jumped into a legal battle involving efforts by self-described psychic Uri Geller - who is famous for claiming to bend spoons by mental forces -- to censor video clips of him posted on YouTube...
"Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law," said foundation attorney Marcia Hoffman. "If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use -- it's as simple as that."
Hot Air & EFF challenge UMG
Michelle Malkin, Hot Air with Michelle Malkin
Heads-up, readers and viewers! We are teaming up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to contest Universal Music Group's takedown of our Akon report on YouTube.
'Psychic' Uri Geller sues over video clip on YouTube
Declan McCullagh, CNET
Early Wednesday we told you about a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed against so-called psychic Uri Geller over allegedly misusing copyright law to silence critics on YouTube...
If EFF is right, Geller could face legal liability and be forced to cough up some cash. In an earlier case, EFF managed to extract $125,000 from Diebold for misusing the DMCA takedown process.
Ruckus will likely replace CDigix
Ben Slivnick, The Diamondback (University of Maryland)
A largely overlooked music streaming service available free to college students nationwide since January may rise to new prominence on the campus, as OIT officials consider signing an agreement with Ruckus Network, Inc...
CDigix has repeatedly declined to release statistics on the number of students who used the service, it received a lukewarm reception on the campus because students had to pay an extra fee to download songs and it wasn't available on Apple computers.
And with many of these same pitfalls present in the Ruckus service, Rebecca Jeschke, media relations coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet activist organization, said she was hardly surprised more students weren't using the software already.
Spoon-bending psychic sued over Youtube boob
The Inquirer
Israeli psychic Uri Geller is being sued after kicking up a fuss over a video clip posted on Youtube which claims to expose the alleged 'secrets' of his spoon bending antics...
"Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law," said Marcia Hoffman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is representing Sapient.
"If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use -- it's as simple as that."
Uri Geller sued after quashing questioning clip
PC Pro
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued Uri Geller after he persuaded YouTube to remove a video, which he said violated his copyright...
'Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law,' said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman. 'If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use - it's as simple as that.'
EFF to psychic: There will be a DMCA abuse suit in the near future
Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has begun fighting back this week against one DMCA takedown abuser. The organization has filed a lawsuit against "paranormalist" Uri Geller for sending a takedown notice to YouTube over a video that heavily criticizes his psychic and magical abilities...
Sapient, with the help of the EFF, seized this opportunity to turn Geller's obvious abuse of the DMCA into an example for other abusers."We filed the lawsuit to protect our client's free speech rights and to fight back again illegal use of the DMCA takedown process," EFF staff attorney Jason Schultz told Ars Technica. "We believe the sole reason Geller sent the takedown was to silence our client's free speech critiquing him."
Just An Online Minute... Can Magician Make Lawsuit Disappear?
Wendy Davis, Mediapost
Entertainer Uri Geller has landed in court - the latest defendant in a string of cases related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
In the Geller lawsuit, the EFF claims that Geller and/or his representatives demanded YouTube purge a 13-minute video of NOVA's "Secrets of the Psychics," which purports to debunk Geller's "psychic" shenanigans. But the clip contains only three seconds of material owned by Geller - "a classic fair use of the material for criticism purposes," according to the EFF.
EFF Enters New Legal Skirmish Over YouTube Clip
Adario Strange, Wired News
In what will surely go down in the history books as their oddest adversary, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has locked horns with none other than paranormal pop start Uri Geller. Geller, known in the past for his "ability" to bend spoons with his mind, issued a takedown notice to a YouTuber named Brian Sapient who posted video of the magic man.
Spoon-bending psychic sued over Youtube boob
The Inquirer
Israeli psychic Uri Geller is being sued after kicking up a fuss over a video clip posted on Youtube which claims to expose the alleged 'secrets' of his spoon bending antics...
"Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law," said Marcia Hoffman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is representing Sapient.
"If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use -- it's as simple as that."
Hot Air & EFF challenge UMG
Michelle Malkin, Hot Air with Michelle Malkin
Heads-up, readers and viewers! We are teaming up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to contest Universal Music Group's takedown of our Akon report on YouTube.
Uri Geller sued after quashing questioning clip
PC Pro
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued Uri Geller after he persuaded YouTube to remove a video, which he said violated his copyright...
'Uri Geller may not like it when people question his paranormal abilities. However, he is not allowed to stifle public criticism by misusing the law,' said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman. 'If the publication of a video does not infringe his copyright, then he cannot block its use - it's as simple as that.'
'Psychic' Uri Geller sues over video clip on YouTube
Declan McCullagh, CNET
Early Wednesday we told you about a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed against so-called psychic Uri Geller over allegedly misusing copyright law to silence critics on YouTube...
If EFF is right, Geller could face legal liability and be forced to cough up some cash. In an earlier case, EFF managed to extract $125,000 from Diebold for misusing the DMCA takedown process.
Just An Online Minute... Can Magician Make Lawsuit Disappear?
Wendy Davis, Mediapost
Entertainer Uri Geller has landed in court - the latest defendant in a string of cases related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
In the Geller lawsuit, the EFF claims that Geller and/or his representatives demanded YouTube purge a 13-minute video of NOVA's "Secrets of the Psychics," which purports to debunk Geller's "psychic" shenanigans. But the clip contains only three seconds of material owned by Geller - "a classic fair use of the material for criticism purposes," according to the EFF.
EFF Enters New Legal Skirmish Over YouTube Clip
Adario Strange, Wired News
In what will surely go down in the history books as their oddest adversary, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has locked horns with none other than paranormal pop start Uri Geller. Geller, known in the past for his "ability" to bend spoons with his mind, issued a takedown notice to a YouTuber named Brian Sapient who posted video of the magic man.
Internet Calls Subject To Phone Tapping
Eric Thomas, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Companies that provide Internet phone service have just six days to meet a deadline from the Justice Department. By next Monday, they'll have to make their systems easier to tap. That's right -- make it easier to secretly listen in on your phone calls, or face daily fines of $10,000 dollars...
But the law seemed to exempt phone calls made over the Internet.
Lee Tien, Electronic Frontier Foundation: "At least that's what most people thought."
Not the FBI or Justice Department. In 2004, they convinced the FCC to expand the law to cover Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP calls.
Lee Tien: "Every privacy group was against it because we thought there were major problems there, but we lost."
Internet Calls Subject To Phone Tapping
Eric Thomas, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Companies that provide Internet phone service have just six days to meet a deadline from the Justice Department. By next Monday, they'll have to make their systems easier to tap. That's right -- make it easier to secretly listen in on your phone calls, or face daily fines of $10,000 dollars...
But the law seemed to exempt phone calls made over the Internet.
Lee Tien, Electronic Frontier Foundation: "At least that's what most people thought."
Not the FBI or Justice Department. In 2004, they convinced the FCC to expand the law to cover Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP calls.
Lee Tien: "Every privacy group was against it because we thought there were major problems there, but we lost."
The Grill: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann on the Hot Seat
Thomas Hoffman, ComputerWorld
In March, Viacom International Inc. filed a $1 billion-plus lawsuit against YouTube Inc. parent Google Inc., claiming that YouTube infringed Viacom copyrights by streaming more than 1.5 billion clips of TV shows such as The Colbert Report and SpongeBob SquarePants. The outcome will help determine whether Web-hosting sites are protected under the so-called Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case will also likely have a major bearing on how copyrights, patents and intellectual property are treated in the evolving digital landscape.
5 questions for Fred von Lohmann
USA TODAY
Entertainment industry lawyers recently sent cease-and-desist letters to several websites, including popular news site Digg. Their alleged offense: posting information that could be used to break copy protection on high definition DVDs. When Internet users learned of the lawyers' demands, they protested by spreading the information over thousands of sites. Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains what all the fuss is about.
The Grill: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann on the Hot Seat
Thomas Hoffman, ComputerWorld
In March, Viacom International Inc. filed a $1 billion-plus lawsuit against YouTube Inc. parent Google Inc., claiming that YouTube infringed Viacom copyrights by streaming more than 1.5 billion clips of TV shows such as The Colbert Report and SpongeBob SquarePants. The outcome will help determine whether Web-hosting sites are protected under the so-called Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case will also likely have a major bearing on how copyrights, patents and intellectual property are treated in the evolving digital landscape.
5 questions for Fred von Lohmann
USA TODAY
Entertainment industry lawyers recently sent cease-and-desist letters to several websites, including popular news site Digg. Their alleged offense: posting information that could be used to break copy protection on high definition DVDs. When Internet users learned of the lawyers' demands, they protested by spreading the information over thousands of sites. Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains what all the fuss is about.
Phones studied as attack detector
Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
The government is researching whether the best defense against a chemical, biological or radiological attack might one day be right in everyone's hands - or on their ears...
Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says he's wary of any program in which "consumer products become surveillance devices for the government."
Wrestling With the Copyright Takedown
Corynne McSherry, The Recorder
Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Fair Use Project filed a lawsuit against Viacom International to protect the free-speech rights of MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. Viacom had improperly issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice to YouTube over "Stop the Falsiness" - a humorous video built around clips from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." The video was clearly a parody and, therefore, a non-infringing fair use.
Bush administration proposes retroactive immunity for phone companies
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Retroactive immunity from prosecution is a beautiful thing if you're a major telecommunications provider in the US, and phone companies are about to receive it if the Bush administration gets its way...
With Congress unwilling to figure out what was going on, individuals and advocacy groups began filing lawsuits against the phone companies. The EFF and others argued that communications privacy laws had been violated, but the government countered by claiming that a "state secrets" privilege meant that the cases should simply be thrown out. Though some cases were dismissed, the EFF's case against AT&T continues, though it would also be dismissed if the proposed new legislation passes.
Bush Wants Phone Firms Immune to Privacy Suits
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
The Bush administration is urging Congress to pass a law that would halt dozens of lawsuits charging phone companies with invading ordinary citizens' privacy through a post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program...
"To let them off the hook now sets a dangerous precedent by encouraging them to continue to engage in illegal collaborations with the government in the future," said Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which last year filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, charging that the company allowed the government to unlawfully monitor U.S. residents."
Phones studied as attack detector
Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
The government is researching whether the best defense against a chemical, biological or radiological attack might one day be right in everyone's hands - or on their ears...
Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says he's wary of any program in which "consumer products become surveillance devices for the government."
Wrestling With the Copyright Takedown
Corynne McSherry, The Recorder
Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Fair Use Project filed a lawsuit against Viacom International to protect the free-speech rights of MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. Viacom had improperly issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice to YouTube over "Stop the Falsiness" - a humorous video built around clips from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." The video was clearly a parody and, therefore, a non-infringing fair use.
Bush administration proposes retroactive immunity for phone companies
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
Retroactive immunity from prosecution is a beautiful thing if you're a major telecommunications provider in the US, and phone companies are about to receive it if the Bush administration gets its way...
With Congress unwilling to figure out what was going on, individuals and advocacy groups began filing lawsuits against the phone companies. The EFF and others argued that communications privacy laws had been violated, but the government countered by claiming that a "state secrets" privilege meant that the cases should simply be thrown out. Though some cases were dismissed, the EFF's case against AT&T continues, though it would also be dismissed if the proposed new legislation passes.
Bush Wants Phone Firms Immune to Privacy Suits
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
The Bush administration is urging Congress to pass a law that would halt dozens of lawsuits charging phone companies with invading ordinary citizens' privacy through a post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program...
"To let them off the hook now sets a dangerous precedent by encouraging them to continue to engage in illegal collaborations with the government in the future," said Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which last year filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, charging that the company allowed the government to unlawfully monitor U.S. residents."
Web Users Unite Against DRM: Antipiracy Code Now Public
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=7185&cid=10 Francis Yeo, New York Times
There is open revolt on the Web...
"It's a perfect example of how a lawyer's involvement can turn a little story into a huge story," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. "Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame."
Digg Reverses Course After Online Uproar
Larry Magid, CBS News
The Web site Digg - where people get to submit links to articles and blog items that they think others should pay attention to - has been involved in a hailstorm of controversy this week over its initial adherence and eventual rejection of a legal notice from a movie industry anti-piracy group...
But Fred Von Lohmann, intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, doesn't think there's much chance that Digg will "die" as a result of the decision.
"It's very unlikely that the AACS is going to sue Digg over this," he said in an interview.
Anti-piracy secret code posted on net
UPI
Savvy U.S. Internet users are distributing a code used by the technology and movie industries to thwart piracy of high-definition films...
"It's a perfect example of how a lawyer's involvement can turn a little story into a huge story, said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity."
Web Users Unite Against DRM: Antipiracy Code Now Public
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=7185&cid=10 Francis Yeo, New York Times
There is open revolt on the Web...
"It's a perfect example of how a lawyer's involvement can turn a little story into a huge story," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. "Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame."
Digg Reverses Course After Online Uproar
Larry Magid, CBS News
The Web site Digg - where people get to submit links to articles and blog items that they think others should pay attention to - has been involved in a hailstorm of controversy this week over its initial adherence and eventual rejection of a legal notice from a movie industry anti-piracy group...
But Fred Von Lohmann, intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, doesn't think there's much chance that Digg will "die" as a result of the decision.
"It's very unlikely that the AACS is going to sue Digg over this," he said in an interview.
Anti-piracy secret code posted on net
UPI
Savvy U.S. Internet users are distributing a code used by the technology and movie industries to thwart piracy of high-definition films...
"It's a perfect example of how a lawyer's involvement can turn a little story into a huge story, said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity."
Digg's Dilemma
Andy Greenberg, Forbes
The Web 2.0 movement is based, in theory, on the idea that everyone on the Internet gets to have his or her say. But what happens when visitors to Web 2.0 sites start pushing the legal limits of free speech?...
All of that, says Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, means Digg is in uncharted legal territory. "This sort of issue is one of the least explored areas of the law and the Internet," he says.
Egypt's bloggers do it better
CafeBabel
In some UN member countries, censorship-free media is still a wishful fantasy...
Danny O'Brien, 39, a specialist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that such technology is readily available and used in European countries. 'In the UK, British Telecom cooperates with non-governmental organisations, such as the Internet Watch Foundation. They look for websites that contain child pornography and block their users from accessing these sites or individual URLs.'
Western states urge delaying standard driver's license law
Aurelio Rojas, Sacramento Bee
Department of motor vehicles officials from Western states on Tuesday urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to delay implementation of a law requiring states to standardize driver's licenses...
Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group, noted that the regulations leave it to states to secure personal information.
"It will be the weakest states' guidelines that will lay the basis of protection," Slater said. "DHS regulations cannot fix the fundamental problems with the Real ID.
Digg's Dilemma
Andy Greenberg, Forbes
The Web 2.0 movement is based, in theory, on the idea that everyone on the Internet gets to have his or her say. But what happens when visitors to Web 2.0 sites start pushing the legal limits of free speech?...
All of that, says Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, means Digg is in uncharted legal territory. "This sort of issue is one of the least explored areas of the law and the Internet," he says.
Egypt's bloggers do it better
CafeBabel
In some UN member countries, censorship-free media is still a wishful fantasy...
Danny O'Brien, 39, a specialist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that such technology is readily available and used in European countries. 'In the UK, British Telecom cooperates with non-governmental organisations, such as the Internet Watch Foundation. They look for websites that contain child pornography and block their users from accessing these sites or individual URLs.'
Western states urge delaying standard driver's license law
Aurelio Rojas, Sacramento Bee
Department of motor vehicles officials from Western states on Tuesday urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to delay implementation of a law requiring states to standardize driver's licenses...
Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group, noted that the regulations leave it to states to secure personal information.
"It will be the weakest states' guidelines that will lay the basis of protection," Slater said. "DHS regulations cannot fix the fundamental problems with the Real ID.
Administrators Limit Student Site's Content
Clifford M. Marks, Harvard Crimson
Less than a week after this month's launch of CrimsonConnect.com, a student-driven portal created as an alternative to the University's my.harvard.edu Web site, the project's leader received an e-mail from Harvard administrators requesting that PIN-protected content be removed from the portal...
"I will say that in general, factual information is not something the University can restrict as a copyright thing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney who specializes in intellectual property law at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "From a legal point of getting sued, factual information is one of the solid grounds you can have for republishing."
Property web site takes snooping a step further
Sue McAllister, San Jose Mercury News
It's simple these days to find vast amounts of free real estate information online, including photos of houses for sale, value estimates and recent sales data - information that until recently was hard for most consumers to find...
Government databases of property records for years have been sold to private companies who use them for marketing purposes, among other things, said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation, which addresses such questions as whether the government should be archiving as much information as it does.
"Public records have always been a double-edged sword for privacy, but it didn't hit us in the face most of the time," the way it does in the Internet age, he said. Some consumers will be upset about PropertyShark's display of data, he said, "then we'll have a public dialogue about it, which is the way it has to be."
Baldwin's big mouth sends new message
CW Nevius, San Francisco Chronicle
Actor Alec Baldwin isn't likely to win Father of the Year. However, he's well on his way to winning Phone Message of the Year...
"I'll bet you will be able to find that phone tape in 50 years,'' says Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech and privacy nonprofit.
Studios want security at cinemas to stop piracy
CBC
Hollywood studios are stepping up their efforts to prevent movie piracy in Canada by hiring security to search for camcorders at the openings of blockbuster movies...
Ren Bucholz of online advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation said studios are looking in the wrong place to stop pirates.
New spyware legislation a mixed bag
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
A comprehensive spyware bill recently cleared the House Energy & Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection (it flows trippingly from the tongue, no?) and is busy stirring up controversy...
Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney for the EFF, said in a statement that "this is a terrible move" because "software and adware vendors are trying to quietly block consumer class actions that could target their misbehavior." The EFF believes, for instance, that it could not have brought suit against Sony BMG for the rootkit that was installed on many of the company's CDs if this law had been in place at the time. "If Congress is serious about enacting tough anti-spyware laws," von Lohmann continued, "it should create incentives that would encourage private citizens to pursue the bad guys."
Carte Blanche Criminal Law a Threat to Innovation
Ag-IP-news
The European Parliament voted today on the first Community criminal law ever, the Criminal Measures IP directive...
An alliance of European Consumer's Organization (BEUC), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Foundation for a free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), representing European consumers, innovators and library associations, strongly oppose certain provisions of the proposed directive on the enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs).
To avoid court showdown, lawmakers may tweak online trademark registry program
Linda Fantin, Salt Lake Tribune
Legislative leaders are looking to tweak a troublesome trademark protection program rather than defend it in court, after an unprecedented meeting with Internet power brokers who would prefer the new registry be scrapped...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the law may be in conflict with existing federal laws and is "a dangerous step toward transforming trademarks into monopolies on language" that courts have struck down.
IPRED2 passes, with tweaks to protect personal copying
Mark Ballard and Lucy Sherriff, The Register
The European Parliament voted yesterday to pass legislation that could still see people copying music or movies for their own personal use stand in the dock alongside hard-nosed counterfeiters and commercial copyright blaggers...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) spokesman Danny O'Brien says there were really only two good possible outcomes: the first would have been an outright rejection. The other would be that the directive was so badly drafted and so unclear that the council would be unwilling to let it pass into criminal law and would tear it apart.
IP Enforcement Directive Clears EU Parliament But Opposition Remains
Dugie Standeford, Intellectual Property Watch
A European Commission proposal to criminalise intentional, for-profit intellectual property counterfeiting and piracy won backing from the European Parliament on 25 April. The 374-278 first-reading vote on an amended version of the IP enforcement rights directive, known as IPRED2, followed months of controversy and heavy lobbying which show no signs of abating...
Defining commercial scale as "obtaining by a commercial advantage" does not make it clear "if saving money by filesharing instead of buying CDs would give anyone a commercial advantage or not," said Erik Josefsson, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) European affairs coordinator. If it did, he said, the act of sharing files would, under Zingaretti's definition, not be considered private use for personal and not-for-profit purposes.
Controversial copyright directive passes European Parliament
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
The Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (IPRED2), which we last covered earlier this month, came another step closer to passage yesterday, as it was approved by the European Parliament...
Ren Bucholz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the relatively close vote-374 to 278-points to growing opposition to the directive across Europe. The directive will now go to the Council of the European Union, which is made up of representatives of the governments of each of the EU's member countries.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Companies Should Be Allowed To Break Law if Helping Government
Ryan Singel, Wired News
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is arguing to a federal appeals court that laws shouldn't apply to companies that help the government in the name of homeland security and that the court should dismiss a suit against AT&T for allegedly violating federal privacy laws in helping the government spy on Americans without warrants...
The group filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last month, as the court prepares to hear an appeal of a lower court decision allowing a suit against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to proceed, despite the government's attempt to squash the case by arguing that the case will imperil national security.
YouTube Is Not A Crime: EFF And Viacom Settle Up
Scott Gilbertson, Wired News
The EFF has dismissed its lawsuit against Viacom. The suit was originally filed last month on behalf of MoveOn and Brave New Films after Viacom sent a massive number of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube which resulted in the removal of content that was in no way related to Viacom,
In a note on the EFF site yesterday the foundation writes that it dropped the suit because "Viacom acknowledged their mistake, told us about the policies it has put in place to protect fair use on YouTube, and agreed to introduce improvements to those policies."
SF Activist Groups Drop Viacom Lawsuit Over Colbert Parody
KTVU and Bay City News
Two activist groups Monday dismissed a lawsuit they filed in federal court in San Francisco last month against Viacom International Inc. for demanding removal of a parody of the Colbert Report from YouTube...
Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer who represented MoveOn.org, said the media conglomerate had taken important steps "to respect newsworthy and transformative uses of their material."
The attorney said, "We hope other media companies will follow Viacom's lead."
Viacom: We goofed on Colbert parody takedown notice; case dismissed
Eric Bangeman, Ars Technica
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Viacom have agreed to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Viacom of misusing the DMCA after the entertainment company admitted it erred in issuing a takedown notice to YouTube. The EFF and the Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project filed the lawsuit after Viacom issued the DMCA takedown notice over a clip parodying comedian Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report airs on Viacom's Comedy Central channel...
"With Viacom sending more than 160,000 DMCA takedown notices, it may not even be aware which videos it told YouTube to remove," said the EFF. "If that's right, then Viacom will inevitably end up censoring some perfectly legitimate videos-surely, the MoveOn/Brave New Films video is not the only example of a fair use that got caught in Viacom's driftnet."
Activist groups drop lawsuit against Viacom over removal of parody on YouTube
Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press
Activist groups dropped a federal lawsuit against Viacom Inc. on Monday after the parent of Comedy Central acknowledged it made a mistake by asking YouTube to yank a parody of the cable network's "The Colbert Report"...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation declared victory in announcing that Viacom agreed to add information on its Web site about its stance on such parodies and to set up an e-mail address to receive complaints about possible errors in the future.
Policing Web Video With 'Fingerprints'
Kevin J. Delaney, Brooks Barnes, and Matthew Karnitschnig, Wall Street Journal
Can "fingerprinting" bring a truce to the Web's video-copyright wars?..
Video-sharing sites such as YouTube say they are protected from liability for copyright claims under "safe harbor" provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. But, under the DMCA, sites that have "actual knowledge" or control of infringing content can lose such protections. "What these filters do is potentially create more knowledge, more awareness of what's going on," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual-property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "There is some residual risk that you could lose the safe-harbor protections if you have too much of that kind of knowledge."
EFF Makes Viacom Cry Uncle On Fair Use
Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews
We've said it before: It's not a good idea to eff with the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Now that Viacom has admitted it effed up by ordering the take down of a parody on YouTube, the EFF and Stanford Law's Fair Use Project (FUP, or as they collectively should be known, EFF-FUP) have dismissed their lawsuit.
EFF Drops Viacom Suit
Mat Honan, Wired News
The EFF announced that its dropping its lawsuit against Viacom on Monday after the company admitted error in issuing a DMCA takedown notice against a YouTube parody of The Colbert Report. The DMCA takedown prompted the EFF to file a lawsuit on behalf of the video's creators, MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. The EFF has now dismissed that suit following action from Viacom.
www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_5707972
Editorial: "Increase information access", Denver Post
The 1966 federal Freedom of Information Act is an incomparable tool for citizens, businesses, organizations and journalists who need access to government documents.
Unfortunately, it's a tool that the government all too often makes as hard as possible to use.
A recent Washington Post item noted the FBI had told a federal court that it could comply with a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that works to protect privacy - but it couldn't finish the work until 2013.
Utah's Scared of the Internet
Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews
Utah lawmakers are at it again, mulling a legislative crackdown on open wi-fi connections because they make it easier for children to access online pornography...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already taken Utah to task on "dangerous" laws. Given that the EFF isn't afraid of the FBI or the European Union, and has a history of spanking its opponents, Utah may be in for some trouble.
Copyright protection warning for Web 2.0 start ups
Gavin Clarke, The Register
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has given Web 2.0 media sharing start-ups some non-technical advice: run your ideas past a lawyer first to stay on the right side of copyright law...
"One of the big mistakes I see in this space is failure to engage legal counsel soon enough. Often these involve business issues - like how do you want users and employees to interact on the site," staff attorney Fred von Lohman said.
Judge rules county violated election law
Ian Hoffman, The Daily Review
A state judge has found that elections officials in Alameda County violated the California Constitution and election law by refusing to provide data about Diebold touchscreen voting machinery to proponents of a failed ballot initiative seeking a recount...
Matt Zimmerman, an electronic-voting expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded the ruling is "an absolute, best-case scenario." "There's certainly no motivation here for elections officials to want to voluntarily turn this over because any indication that anything went wrong implicates their administration and their selection of the machines in the first place," Zimmerman said. "We haven't had a good ruling like this to tell elections officials to follow the law."
Open Source, Transparency and Electronic Voting
John P. Mello Jr., TechNewsWorld
Transparency has become a rallying cry for critics of existing electronic voting systems mad by secretive corporations jealously guarding the software code inside their products...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been frustrated by the clandestine nature of the electronic voting systems it has encountered, according to Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman.
Speaking before a congressional subcommittee on elections last month, Zimmerman testified, "EFF has served, among other roles, as both election observers and as legal counsel for voters who felt compelled to challenge the use of results of apparently malfunctioning voting equipment.
"In both capacities, we and others have been severely hampered by the lack of transparency inherent in the current closed technological regime.
"For both of these purposes, the use of open or disclosed source voting technology as a component of a more open election process would immediately and demonstrably lead to a more competent electorate," he stated.
Internet freedom group wants delay in Utah law
Glen Warchol, Salt Lake Tribune
A organization dedicated to protecting Internet freedom Monday asked Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff to halt implementation of Utah's new Trademark Protection Act, saying it will harm consumers and threatens free speech.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation urged Shurtleff to delay the law's June 30 implementation because consumer groups and law professors "believe that the legislation's restrictions on using trademarks to trigger competitive advertising will have a devastating effect on Internet users, online speech, and Internet commerce."
Google plan raises privacy issue
Joseph Menn, Los Angeles Times
Google Inc.'s purchase of DoubleClick Inc. would create the world's single largest repository of details about people's behavior online, an unnerving prospect for some privacy experts...
"This is something that is concerning," said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Privacy concerns dog Google-DoubleClick deal
Stefanie Olsen, CNET
There is growing unease among consumer privacy advocates over Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick...
"This is bringing together two very large advertising networks. To the extent that information is being centralized raises concerns that it could become a target" for hackers or overzealous government investigators, said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal advocacy group. "Google said it has no plans to integrate the two services...but that doesn't mean that later, you might not develop those plans."
Soldiers' stories and then some -- series brings home both sides of war
David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
"America at a Crossroads" is the 11-part documentary series supposedly designed to prove that the Public Broadcasting System isn't a teeming nest of lily-livered, anti-war, Bush-bashing liberals, so please don't cut off our funding...
But perhaps the scariest film of all is "Security Versus Liberty: The Other War" (9 p.m. Friday), which reminds us that the protection of liberty is often at odds with liberty itself. The film looks at the ongoing tug of war between the Bush administration, armed with the Homeland Security Act, and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, not to mention a group of Connecticut librarians who fought the government's efforts to acquire information on book borrowers through something called a National Security Letter.
EFF Sues For Release of NSL Abuse Records
Joe Lewis, WebProNews
On the heels of Congressional hearings and extensive media coverage of a Justice Department report documenting abuse of privacy measures, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking an emergency order that would require the FBI to surrender and make public all records regarding the misuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect private information from American citizens...
"Congress has already dedicated several hearings to the FBI's abuse of investigative power and is thinking about how to prevent such abuses in the future," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann.
"But if there is going to be meaningful debate about this issue, we need more information than what the Administration chooses to make public, and we need it now."
Higher digital music prices not a good deal
Brian Garrity, Reuters
Four years ago when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the company preached the good news of an easy-to-understand pricing structure for consumers: all tracks at 99 cents, most albums for $9.99...
In Apple's case, critics like Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation contend that consumers actually are getting a raw deal by being charged a 30% premium to effectively buy back their rights. And while audio quality is improved, it still doesn't match CD quality.
Utah vs. Google: Trademark Debates Heat Up
Joe Lewis, WebProNews
The Utah State Legislature has passed a bill that would make it illegal to purchase keywords relating to a competitor's product in order to show up alongside them in search results. The Trademark Protection Act has come under much public scrutiny, most notably by Google...
As if the mounting case against the Constitutionality of the bill weren't bad enough for Utah, now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is involved.
Google vs. Utah: State takes flak for its attempts to police Web
Linda Fantin and Glen Warchol, Salt Lake Tribune
Corynne McSherry is an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)...
McSherry says Utah's new law poses a serious problem for the state, noting the EFF probably would support a lawsuit. Keying off a trademark to give consumers information about competitive products is fair use and protected under federal trademark law, she says.
"If it weren't, we wouldn't have the Pepsi Challenge, Apple wouldn't be able to make fun of Microsoft on national television every night, and Burger King wouldn't be able to put up a billboard next to a McDonald's," McSherry says.
"If I were a Utah taxpayer, I would wonder why my representative wanted to vote for a bill that hurts me as a consumer and one the state's own counsel said is unconstitutional."
EFF takes up arms against Euro copyright move
Lucy Sherriff, The Register
The European wing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken on the might of the European Commission by beginning its opposition to IPRED2, the proposed new directive that aims to harmonise European copyright laws...
Their new site says: IPRED2's new crime of "aiding, abetting and inciting" infringement again takes aim at innovators, including open source coders, media-sharing sites like YouTube, and ISPs that refuse to block P2P services.
FBI Gets Six Years for FOIA Request
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
The oldest reported Freedom of Information Act request in the federal government resides at the Justice Department and is 18 years old -- or, as the National Security Archive, a research group that tracks these things, likes to say, "old enough to enlist in the Army and go to Iraq."
So perhaps it should be no surprise that the FBI has just told a federal court that it will need until 2013 to process a request for information from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy organization.
National Security Letters Back in the Spotlight
Luke O'Brien, Wired News
The FBI's controversial use of National Security Letters to illegally obtain phone, email and banking records of American citizens will be under the microscope again today as an NSL recipient testifies in front of Congress about his experience...
In related news, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the Justice Department to force the FBI to release all records concerning the illegal use of NSLs. The EFF claims the FBI is dragging its feet and has failed to meet a 20-day timeline set by Congress.
Students sue antiplagiarism website for rights to their homework
Ben Arnoldy, Christian Science Monitor
In a table-turning episode in the digital copyright wars, four teenagers are suing a business for allegedly trampling on their copyrights. Their product: homework...
"There are a lot of businesses that depend on making [digital] copies in order to index, or make things searchable, or create filters, or [perform] matching. All of these kinds of things today are valuable and in high demand," says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "You'll see a lot more cases involving indexing copy."
A "new kind of identity theft": Utah bans keyword advertising by rival firms
Nate Anderson, Ars technica
Utah is best known for snow, salt, and Mormons, but the state also has a large business community that has no plans to keep turning the other cheek when it comes to keyword advertising...
This entire issue is really just the extension of comparative advertising into a new medium. As the EFF points out, this sort of thing has been legal in the off-line world for decades. "Comparative advertising uses those shorthand terms to provide more information about the trademarked product and competitive products," says Corynne McSherry."That's why comparative trademark use is clearly protected under federal trademark law. If it weren't, Pepsi wouldn't be able to tell consumers that more people think Pepsi tastes better than Coke, and Apple wouldn't be able to make fun of Microsoft on national television every night."
Just An Online Minute... Utah, Land Of Dumb Internet Laws?
Wendy Davis, MediaPost
Utah has quietly passed a new law that aims to regulate search advertising by prohibiting marketers from bidding to appear as sponsored links when people search for names of their rivals. For instance, the law would ban Dell Computer from bidding to appear as a paid search ad when search users query on the term IBM...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have come out strongly in favor of allowing trademarks to trigger paid search links, arguing that such ads benefit consumers.
Can Data Have a Life After a Death?
Stanley P. Jaskiewicz, Law.com
Everyone who has worked with a computer, even before the arrival of the Internet, knows the sickening feeling of loss. Without warning, hours of your work suddenly vanish from the screen...
According to Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the practical solution recommended by the Army memo -- "to make explicit plans ahead of time to grant or deny access to their private e-mail accounts -- whether that involves handing passwords to a trusted friend or loved one, leaving word with their families that they would like the privacy of their e-mail respected even after death, or any number of other options" is "good advice for soldiers and their families, but it applies to everyone with an e-mail account."
RIAA and movie industry want to pretext
Nick Farrell, The Inquirer
The RIAA and the movie industry are lobbying lawmakers in a bid to get it excused from tough laws on pretexting...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that if the RIAA gets away with its changes it will create a loophole which is so big that nobody else has to follow the law either.
Sites uncover online dating web of lies
Jessica Yadegaran, Contra Costa Times
Beware of Gregory from Oakland. He is not single. Rather, he is married, and cheats on his wife Saturday nights before church, no less. Not only that, but "he dyes his hair and lies about his age," according to a post by his anonymous ex-girlfriend on Dontdatehimgirl.com...
Some men have pursued legal action, with no success.
"The soap box is not liable for what the speaker says," explains Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Passed in 1996, it protects Web site owners from content posted by third parties.
The speaker, however, still remains liable. Even an anonymous defamer can be tracked down through his or her IP address, Opsahl says.
MarketWatch writer leaves amid conflict report
Mark Boslet, San Jose Mercury News
The blogosphere has been called the Wild West of the 21st century, a free-wheeling panoply of information from sources trustworthy and not...
"The blogosphere has a relatively unregulated context, and I think that is a good thing," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Readers have to become critical consumers of information."
Music and movie piracy hunters go after privacy law
Dawn C. Chmielewski and Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times
The music and movie industries are lobbying state legislators for permission to deceive when pursuing suspected music pirates...
"I don't see why the recording industry shouldn't have to follow the same laws that everyone else follows," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group in San Francisco. "It appears they want to make the loophole so big that nobody else has to follow the law, either."
Protecting Your College From Patent Lawsuits Over Technology
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Companies are being granted what critics call overly broad patents on common technologies that colleges use. The companies are attempting to enforce the patents - by demanding the payment of royalties - on such routine activities as streaming videos online and administering tests over the Internet...
Jason Schultz, a lawyer and advocate for liberal rights in cyberspace, will answer your questions about patent law, what colleges should be concerned about, and how colleges can protect themselves from lawsuits.
Utah Ban On Trademarked Keywords Rankles Groups
Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek
Utah last month enacted Utah SB 236, the "Trademark Protection Act," a law that effectively prohibits the competitive use of trademarked terms as keyword advertising triggers...
"Aside from its constitutional flaws, the law is just bad public policy," said Corynne McSherry, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a recent blog post. "It undermines the fundamental purpose of trademarks: to improve consumer access to accurate information about goods and services."
Utah Law Bans Competitor Keyword Bids
David Utter, WebProNews
The Utah State Legislature has passed a Trademark Protection Act that creates a new type of mark called an electronic registration mark; it probably will not survive a Constitutional test according to the state's own general counsel...
Banning such competitor trademark usage would undermine legally permitted comparative advertising, according to the EFF's Corynne McSherry. "That's why comparative trademark use is clearly protected under federal trademark law. If it weren't, Pepsi wouldn't be able to tell consumers that more people think Pepsi tastes better than Coke," she wrote.
DRM activists hail EMI Apple deal
Shaun Nichols, IT Week
Digital rights groups have reacted with cautious optimism after EMI announced that it had struck a deal with Apple to distribute its titles in the iTunes Music Store without digital rights management (DRM) technology.
"Certainly this is a step in the right direction," Derek Slater, activism coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told vnunet.com. "It is long past time that the record labels opened up."
Google to sell EchoStar satellite TV ads
Michael Liedke, Associated Press
Google Inc. will sell and select some of the ads shown to EchoStar Communications Corp.'s 13.1 million satellite TV subscribers, marking the online search leader's latest effort to extend its marketing muscle beyond the Internet...
The privacy controls built into Google's TV advertising system will depend largely on how well EchoStar shields the data collected from its set-top boxes, said Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties watchdog.
"The more you aggregate the data, the less troubling it becomes" from a privacy rights perspective, Opsahl said.
Jobs Unlikely to Push for Lift of Video DRM
Nancy Gohring, PC World
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs may be pushing for music labels to lift copyright protection on digital music but he doesn't appear so eager to do the same for video content, despite his position as the largest shareholder in Walt Disney...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another group that has been pushing the music and video industries to drop DRM. While the EMI announcement is a step in the right direction, "why shouldn't this apply to video sold in the iTunes video store? It seems the basic reason for removing DRM should apply there too," said Derek Slater, activism coordinator for EFF.
New rules have passport lines out the door
Suzanne Bohan, San Mateo County Times
Corinne Monge likes to travel to Mexico, but has an expired passport...
When she gets her new document in several weeks, she'll be joining the ranks of Americans carrying ultra secure passports, complete with embedded chips, aimed at foiling attempts by terrorists and others with criminal intent from gaining entry into the country...
Privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation fear that anyone with strong intent to read travelers' digital information could devise a system to do so.
Hollywood copes with tech frets
Ben Fritz, Variety
Nearly five years after the launch of iTunes, music execs are in more of a panic than ever. Due in part to online file-sharing and casual sharing of burned CDs among friends, album sales fell 20% this year and digital downloads, while growing, aren't nearly enough to make up the difference...
"DRM is not only useless against piracy, but it's counter-productive because it gives otherwise legitimate consumers one more reason to prefer the illegitimate copy," says Fred von Lohman, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a prominent DRM critic.
Adult site's legal battle could aid Web hosting services
Anne Broache, CNET
A federal appeals court ruling in a case involving an adult publisher appears to have delivered broader legal protections for online service providers against lawsuits claiming privacy violations and other illicit behavior by their users...
"This is a very important decision for anyone who runs an online business where you handle other peoples' content, whether it be people who create photos or artwork or anything or whether it's users who log in and upload stuff and comment on things," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed briefs supporting Google's arguments against Perfect 10.
Cuban, EFF lawyer spar over YouTube and the DMCA at EFF Pioneer Awards
Nate Anderson, Ars technica
Wearing jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read "I'd rather be fighting the man," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban last night defended his view that YouTube is eroding support for copyrights and that its actions should not qualify for "safe harbor" under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)...
The occasion for the remarks was the EFF's annual "Pioneer Awards," which were this year handed out at the ETech conference in San Diego.
EFF Pioneer Awards: And the winners are ...
Wendy M. Grossman, The Register
Computer rights activist and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, security expert Bruce Schneier, and Yale law professor Yochai Benkler are the latest to be given Pioneer Awards by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The 16th annual awards were handed out last night at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego.
Brussels downbeat on US passenger snoop plan
Mark Ballard, The Register
Transatlantic talks over the US grab for European personal data in its war on terror are floundering, the European Parliament heard yesterday...
Some members of the European Parliament, meanwhile expect that the PNR agreement will be made redundant by the Open Skies agreement for air transport, which is due to be signed in Washington on 30 April. Open Skies contains security provisions that experts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation fear might provide a legal basis for PNR and other US collations of European personal data such as its Automated Targeting System, which builds database profiles of people on its controversial watch-lists.
www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2007/03/26.shtml
Audio: "EFF honors pioneers of the digital age" Jon Gordon, NPR: Future Tense
Tomorrow night, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out its annual Pioneer Awards...
Receiving the award tonight are security expert Bruce Schneier, writer and activist Cory Doctorow, and Yale Law School professor Yochai Benkler.
MoveOn.org files suit against Viacom over online video
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
The continuing war over who controls content on the Internet continued Thursday with reaction to a federal lawsuit by the Internet political group Move-On.org against media behemoth Viacom that opposes the removal of an online video parody of a television parody...
"Sure, it's a funny video, but there's a serious side to this," said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We hope that content owners should think twice before they order material taken down. And we want people to know that they have options when something they post to YouTube gets taken down."
Lime's Gorton Trades Fast, Fights Suit, Seeks Car-Free Utopia
Lisa Kassenaar, Bloomberg
Step off the elevator into Lime Group's offices atop an 11-story brick building in New York's Chinatown into a crowd of more than 60 stone Buddhas and Asian lions, all handpicked by the company's founder, Mark Gorton...
"He's a classic entrepreneur,'' says Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. "He has a lot of businesses going at the same time, and if they don't work out, he'll start three more.''
Viacom sued over Colbert parody on YouTube
Elinor Mills, CNET
Viacom is misusing U.S. copyright law by forcing YouTube to remove a parody video of The Colbert Report, according to a lawsuit filed against the media conglomerate Thursday...
"If you watch this clip for 10 seconds it is clear that it's a parody and it is fair use," said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the EFF, which is working on the case with Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.
COPA Online Porn Law Struck Down
Lisa Vaas, eWeek
A federal court judge on March 22 struck down the Child Online Protection Act (PDF), saying it violates the First and Fifth Amendments and is "impermissibly broad and over-vague"...
The March 22 ruling is a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought the suit against the government along with plaintiffs that included online sex health sites, San Francisco poet laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=local&id=5140715
Video: "Recording Industry Targets UC Downloaders" Wayne Freedman, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Despite efforts by the music industry, it says it is losing $2 billion dollars a year to file sharing pirates and many of them are college students doing it through servers provided by universities. Now, the record companies are clamping down on them, as well. It puts U.C. Berkeley, among others, in a tough position of trying to balance privacy while upholding the law...
This did not go over well at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which defends the rights of cyberspace users.
Viacom Sued for Colbert Takedown; NBC Takes Up with Fox
Natalie Finn, E! Online
Despite its ability to offer unlimited space for an infinite amount of creative material, the Internet sure seems awfully crowded these days. With lawsuits, that is...
Viacom, the cable network's parent company, improperly asked YouTube to pull the spoof because the clips taken from the show were protected under federal copyright law's "fair use" provision, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
Inside Move: MoveOn sues Viacom
Ben Fritz, Variety
While Viacom is busy suing Google over videos that were just taken down from YouTube, MoveOn.org is suing the conglom over a video that just went back up...
EFF attorney Fred Von Lohman said the plaintiffs will continue to seek damages.
"If Fox News got 'The Daily Show' yanked one night because it used a Fox News clip and then the next day said 'oops, that was a mistake,' I don't think they'd be OK with that," he told Daily Variety.
Parodies prompt laughs, lawsuits
Laura Parker, USA Today
Parodies of famous people and name brands are sparking an increasing number of lawsuits...
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal judge to protect the free-speech rights of MoveOn.org. The group's satirical film of The Colbert Report was removed from YouTube after a copyright complaint by Viacom, owners of Comedy Central, which produces the show.
The EFF last year persuaded a federal judge to protect the free-speech rights of Stuart Frankel, whom the creators of Barney had threatened to sue because his website pokes fun at the popular children's TV character.
Music industry threatens student downloaders at UC
Ellen Lee, San Francisco Chronicle
The music industry has sent hundreds of threatening letters to college students across the nation, including dozens at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, as part of its campaign against illegal music downloading...
Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the latest campaign seems like little more than a scare tactic. "These letters are scary. The first impulse is, 'How do I make this go away?' " she said. "If their goal is to stop illegal file sharing, this is not a very effective way of doing it."
EFF calls for greater commitment against digital TV copy protection
Heise Online
Back in 2005, the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) voiced its concerned about the Digital Video Broadcasting Forum's (DVB Forum) standardization of Content Protection Copyright Management (DVB-CPCM). Now, the EFF has published a briefing paper reiterating the Foundation's concerns about the drawbacks of CPCM and complaining about the general support among lawmakers for Digital Rights Management (DRM). The foundation says that politicians are making it easy for the media industry to use DRM techniques as it sees fit, with criminal prosecutors even investigating cases in which DRM was cracked for legal purposes.
Victims fight back against DMCA abuse
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
DMCA takedown notices: sure, they provide an easy way for companies or individuals to get copyrighted information pulled from sites like YouTube, but what happens when the process is abused? The DMCA does require takedown notices to be made under threat of perjury, and damages are possible against those that abuse the takedown process by using it for frivolous or fraudulent purposes. The EFF has recently filed two cases against alleged DMCA abusers, and may be prepping a third against Viacom.
Trial could test digital media rights
Rick Merritt, EE Times
Trial begins Monday here for a civil suit that could become a test case on questions about what fair use rights systems makers and end users have with their digital media. The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) is suing Kaleidescape Inc., claiming the company's home servers violate in several ways a contract designed to protect DVDs from being copied...
"This is a case where what is essentially a cartel is stifling legitimate innovation where there is clear market demand and a technical capability," said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the EFF.
La Fundaci?n Frontera Electr?nica, defensora de los ciberderechos, desembarca en Europa
El Pais
Por primera vez en su historia, la veterana organizaci?n prociberderechos Fundaci?n de la Frontera Electr?nica (EFF) ampl?a su radio de acci?n m?s all? de Estados Unidos y se establece en Bruselas. Erik Josefsson, un conocido activista contra las patentes de software, ser? la cara de la EFF europea. En su mira est?n las leyes de propiedad intelectual y la retenci?n de datos.
La misi?n de la EFF en Europa ser? "poner luz sobre lo que est? sucediendo en Bruselas y utilizar nuestra experiencia en el desarrollo de leyes y pol?ticas", explica Josefsson, quien afirma que, en ?reas como los derechos de autor o la televisi?n digital, "Estados Unidos ha vivido mucho tiempo bajo los efectos de una peligrosa legislaci?n basada en malas decisiones pol?ticas. Europa no deber?a cometer los mismos errores".
Critics to Google: Privacy, please
Alex Pham and Michelle Quinn, Chicago Tribune
Google Inc.'s memory is getting a little shorter. Just not short enough for some...
"There is more that could be done," Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney with privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said about Google's new policy. "It would be nice to see the window narrowed to a shorter time frame. The shorter the better."
DRM coming to a TV near you
Shaun Nichols, Vnunet.com
A cabal of TV studios and entertainment executives is planning to tighten the guidelines on digital video broadcasts, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)...
"The restrictions can be changed at the whim of the rights holder. It may be that today you can record your favourite programme and transfer it to DVD for long-term storage. But next week, you could be prevented from recording or archiving to DVD," said the EFF.
Google's Privacy Move: Not Nearly Good Enough
Preston Gralla, ComputerWorld
Google has finally made a move to protect people's search privacy -- but its actions don't go nearly far enough. Its decision to make search records anonymous after 18 to 24 months is barely a good enough first step...
Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco told Computerworld "We'd love to see a shorter retention period and more complete anonymization."
Bankston would like the policy extended to other Google services, such as Gmail.
Videos Pulled From Web Sites Draw Suits
Amanda Bronstad, National Law Journal
The creators of videos that have been improperly removed by YouTube and other Internet service providers after allegations of copyright violations are fighting back with a new breed of lawsuits...
Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the EFF, a nonprofit civil rights group based in San Francisco, said that he anticipated that more lawsuits will be filed in the coming year. "What you're seeing now is the growing conflict between how easy it is to censor someone using that law and the growth of what's being called user-generated content on the Internet," he said. "This conflict will generate some legal disputes within the year."
DVB broadcast flag will require government support, but may not get it
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica
The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium sets digital television transmission specs for much of the world, but in recent years the group has turned its attention to crafting something far more controversial: a broadcast flag...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the only public-interest group that sat in on DVB's technical meetings over the last three years, and they recently sounded the alarm over the finalization of the Content Protection and Copy Management (CPCM) system.
Viacom suit may reshape copyright law
Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News
The copyright lawsuit filed Tuesday by Viacom against Google and its YouTube subsidiary could end up rewriting one of the key laws of the Internet age: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
"Any ruling in the YouTube case is certain to have implications for companies like Yahoo and eBay, as well as smaller companies like Facebook and imeem," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "All of these companies rely on the exact same principles that YouTube does."
File-Sharing Lawsuit Worries Techies
Brian Deagon, Investor's Business Daily
Two years after winning the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case MGM vs. Grokster, the entertainment industry is back in court to settle a fight some fear could handcuff technology innovation...
"Putting courts in the business of redesigning software is a dangerous precedent to set," said Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Do we want a world where every new technology gets it own federal judge to sit in judgment over the next software update?"
Spying Too Secret For Your Court: AT&T, Gov Tell Ninth
Ryan Singel, Wired News
AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself -- even by showing a signed order from the government -- without endangering national security...
The telecom giant and the government are appealing a June ruling in a federal district court that allowed the suit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the telecom to proceed, despite the government's invocation of a powerful tool called the "states secrets privilege," which allows it to have civil cases dismissed when national secrets are involved.
Feds, AT&T: Eavesdropping Trial Would Reveal State Secrets
KTVU/AP
The federal government is urging an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, warning that disclosure of such activities could compromise national security...
The court filings on Friday are part of the government's appeal of U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision last year to keep the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit alive. Walker ruled that warrantless eavesdropping has been so widely reported that there appears to be no danger of spilling secrets.
Lighting a New Frontier
Josh Richman, Oakland Tribune
The Oakland Tribune reported on EFF's ground-breaking FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government Project, which seeks information through Freedom of Information Act about the government's expanding use of new technologies that invade Americans' privacy.
Foundation fights for right to information
Josh Richman, Contra Costa Times
Digital sunshine pours forth from an office near Washington's' Dupont Circle...
Technology's constant evolution makes it "all the more important that we be aggressive and establish our right to get information as soon as possible," FLAG Project Director David Sobel said. Wait any longer and "the information is likely to be obsolete by the time we get it.
"And when it comes to the government's capacity to engage in invasive conduct, I'm still surprised at what we find."
www.wboc.com/Global/story.asp?S=6202763&nav=QEMt
CBS/Associated Press
The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday...
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the government, in general, needs to return to information gathering methods used prior to the Patriot Act.
The FBI must "limit these very powerful tools to situations in which the government is actually tracking suspected terrorists or spies," Cohn told CBS News Radio.
Record firms crack down on campuses
Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe
The Recording Industry Association of America has opened one of its biggest assaults yet on illegal file swapping with warning letters to 13 colleges, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, asking them to identify on-campus file swappers who the industry intends to pursue for copyright violations...
"We think this is clearly, exactly the wrong direction to be taking," said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group and vocal critic of the music industry's campaign. "It's very clear that illegal downloading is continuing apace and is doing just fine."
News-Press Allegedly Asks Google to Reveal Blog Commenter
Drew Mackie, Santa Barbara Independent
One presumably regular reader of BlogaBarbara - the online journal of Santa Barbara happenings kept by the pseudonymous Sara De La Guerra - would have checked the site yesterday and found a departure from the frequent musings on the internal happenings at the Santa Barbara News-Press: a warning directed specifically at himself or herself that Ampersand Publishing wants to know their name...
Corynne McSherry, an EFF staff attorney who describes the organization as "the ACLU of the internet," said standard procedure of the EFF in these kinds of cases is to demand the subpoenaing party to present just cause for the action in order to ensure that people aren't being exposed for petty reasons. "It's important to understand we're not saying that under no circumstances should you not be able to find out someone's identity if that person has genuinely defamed you... in a way that people would actually believe them," McSherry said. "If that's the case, then you may have a basis for legitimate claim to sue them in a court of law."
Proposed FAIR USE Act to Limit DMCA Restrictions
Tuan Nguyen, Daily Tech
Excessive restrictions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may be a thing of the past if U.S. Representative Rick Boucher has his way...
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has stood against the RIAA in many cases, the FAIR USE Act would help consumers who are being sued for wrong doing when they have not committed any crime. "The bill would loosen the grip of the DMCA, which restricts circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions even for lawful uses," said the EFF in a statement.
Microsoft vs. Google: More at Stake Than Books
Katherine Noyes, TechNewsWorld
Microsoft attorney Thomas Rubin on Tuesday accused Google of taking a "cavalier approach to copyright" and of using its Book Search project to make money off other people's copyrighted creations. His comments have stirred up a debate over the importance of free-market competition versus what is ethical when accessing information.
"My take is that there's something more at stake here than just a spat between Google and Microsoft," Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the E-Commerce Times.
"The bigger question is whether or not you agree with Microsoft that only those who collaborate in advance with copyright holders should be able to innovate and build on the value of copyrighted works. This is ironic coming from a company that claims to be in the business of innovation," he noted.
Thread Control: Lessons from USA Today
Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek.com
When USA Today's staff redesigned the online arm of the national newspaper, they included plenty of space for ordinary readers to "join the conversation"...
The job is somewhat easier online than in print, thanks to a section in the 1996 Communication Decency Act that shields owners of Web forums from the comments made in them. "In essence, Congress has said that the soapbox should not be held liable for what the speaker has said," says Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit public advocacy group focused on free speech online.
Microsoft's Accusations Against Google Don't Impress Copyright Gurus
Jessie Seyfer, The Recorder
Copyright experts scoffed Tuesday at attempts by a top Microsoft lawyer to discredit Google's approach to copyrighted material...
The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is expected to rule on three related cases on that subject by the end of the summer, said Fred Von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Von Lohmann said Rubin's speech, which played up the fact that Microsoft asks copyright holders' permission before using their works, highlighted a way of thinking that he finds highly disturbing. Seeking permission from movie studios and publishing houses before using their material for a new innovation might be something Microsoft -- with its resources -- can do easily, but small-time innovators can't, Von Lohmann said.
Furore after YouTube pulls line dance video
Shaun Nichols, vnunet.com
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has stepped in on behalf of an amateur video maker in a copyright case involving a popular line dance...
"Silver's claim of copyright infringement is absurd and is a classic example of the kind of Digital Millennium Copyright Act abuse that can chill internet speech," said EFF attorney Corynne McSherry.
"Even if Silver had a valid copyright in the dance, which is not at all clear, this is fair use and not infringing."
Just An Online Minute... Dancing With Absurdity
Wendy Davis, MediaPost
Several weeks ago, Viacom famously demanded that YouTube purge a trove of clips from the site -- including some clips not actually owned by the media company, such as a group of friends having dinner at Somerville, Mass.-restaurant Redbones. As it turns out, Viacom isn't the only one to wrongly ask for clips' removal from YouTube. Richard Silver of Groton, Conn., self-described inventor of the "Electric Slide" dance steps, also recently demanded that YouTube take down a clip showing audience members at a concert performing the dance, according to a new lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Suit demands details on secret court's wiretap ruling
Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle
A privacy rights group sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to try to pry loose a ruling by a secret court that the Bush administration says approved its clandestine wiretapping program...
"While national security and law enforcement demand a limited amount of secrecy, Americans have the right to know the government's basic guidelines for this kind of invasive electronic surveillance of their personal communications,'' said David Sobel, a lawyer for the organization.
RIAA Sends Schools a P2P Heads Up
Roy Mark, InternetNews.com
In a new legal campaign launched today against illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is offering college and university students a chance to settle before they get sued...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a longtime critic of the music industry's P2P lawsuits, quickly countered that the RIAA's campaign is doomed.
"It's not a particularly good strategy," Rebecca Jeschke, the EFF's media relations coordinator, told internetnews.com. "The kids will move on to other technologies."
Boucher DMCA Exemption Bill Would Legalize Commercial-Skipping
Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews
A copy of the early draft language of the revised H.R. 1201, sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D - VA) and introduced on the floor of the US House of Representatives yesterday, shows the revised legislation would add six new exemptions to US Code section 1201, which had been amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
For its part, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has come out in support of the bill, also as anticipated. "Technology companies play a game of Russian roulette whenever they create products with both infringing and non-infringing uses," an EFF statement reads this evening.
The Online-Video Takedown Smackdown
Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek.com
Amateur filmmaker Matt Hawes thought his video spoof of MTV's The Real World was sufficiently funny to get noticed on YouTube...
EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry says her organization has seen a recent surge in the number of cases, brought on behalf of people such as Hawes, involving misuse of the act's takedown procedure.
DoJ Sued For Release Of FISA Court Rules On Spy Program
KC Jones, InformationWeek
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the Department of Justice, demanding the release of records related to court orders authorizing electronic surveillance...
In a statement announcing the lawsuit, EFF senior counsel David Sobel said that Americans have the right to know the government's basic guidelines for electronic surveillance of their personal communications. The government has claimed that ordinary Americans haven't been targeted and that only communications involving suspected terrorists have been intercepted.
Music executives judge Jobs, lament losses
Greg Sandoval, CNET
The discussions at a music conference here Tuesday started with an all-around bashing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs before moving to the plethora of issues plaguing the music industry...
In January, EMI said it was reviewing a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow reverse engineering of its digital rights management software. That EMI would even consider the proposal was seen in many circles as a step forward by the anti-DRM camp.
Tech forum questions if pretexting ban will work
Robert Mullins, InfoWorld
Obtaining private records under false pretenses is bad, but some in the technology industry say it happens all the time and wonder whether new federal legislation will curb "pretexting"...
Although some speakers at the summit criticized phone companies for not protecting call records well enough, another wondered how pretexting could be stopped.
"This has been happening for years," said Shari Steele, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
San Francisco turns free Wi-Fi into long battle
Michelle Quinn and James S. Granelli, Los Angeles Times
In his October 2004 State of the City address, Mayor Gavin Newsom pledged to "not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free, wireless Internet service"...
But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other advocates raised concerns about EarthLink's privacy policy. They also complained that Google's ability to track the whereabouts of network users could prove irresistible to law enforcement (Google said people worried about such things could sign up using false names).
Google gets hand in trademark dispute
IT News
Previously critical of the search engine, the Electronic Frontier Foundation supports Google's argument that sponsored links do not constitute infringing uses of trademarks...
"The Internet has brought together speakers of many kinds -- some competing with trademark owners, others criticizing them, still others simply referring to them while discussing other subjects or products," EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry said in a prepared statement. "Services like Google's 'sponsored links' help people with something to say reach those who might be interested in hearing it."
Just An Online Minute... EFF: Trademark Search Buys Protect Free Speech
MediaPost
A federal appellate court is getting ready to decide whether Google's method of selling paid search ads violates trademark law...
With the case now pending in the Second Circuit, the civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has gotten involved. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week, the EFF argues that there's more at stake than just competition between business rivals. The EFF makes the case that Google's policy of allowing people to purchase trademarked names also protects free speech rights.
US judge orders domestic spying cases to proceed
Associated Press
U.S. officials failed to sideline dozens of domestic spying lawsuits on Tuesday as a federal judge ordered the war on terror-connected cases to proceed despite a pending appeal...
"The government wanted this case to be placed in the deep freeze and this decision is allowing it to move forward," EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl told AFP. "We are very pleased. Now, we have to come up with our targeted set of questions."
AT&T Can Continue Hiding Surveillance Secrets
Megan Tady, The New Standard
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Tuesday that evidence will remain sealed in the class-action lawsuit accusing AT&T of collaborating with the government to illegally spy on Americans' communications...
In a press statement, EFF expressed its disappointment in the judge's decision. "Given that the privacy of millions of Americans is at stake, we strongly believe that the public would benefit from seeing this evidence for themselves," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director.
Google Seals Desktop XSS Hole
David Utter, SecurityProNews
A vulnerability in the Google Desktop product could have exposed files on a machine running it to an external attacker...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has had concerns about Google Desktop virtually since its inception. Those concerns escalated when version 3 of the software, with its 'Search Across Computers' feature, hit the Internet in February 2006.
Case against AT&T/NSA continues
ZDNet
A federal judge ruled that a class action lawsuit against AT&T over its participation in NSA spying can go forward, rejecting requests by the government and AT&T to freeze proceedings during an appeal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says...
"We're disappointed that the court did not choose to unseal all of the documents that include or refer to the evidence presented by Mark Klein and our expert, J. Scott Marcus. The government has already agreed that the evidence is neither classified nor a state secret, and is only being held under seal because of AT&T's weak trade secrecy claims," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Given that the privacy of millions of Americans is at stake, we strongly believe that the public would benefit from seeing this evidence for themselves."
Federal judge lets discovery proceed in domestic spying class action lawsuit
Joshua Pantesco, JURIST
US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker issued an order Tuesday imposing a limited stay on discovery in a class action lawsuit challenging the legality of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program, despite the government's request to stay discovery pending the outcome of an appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit...
Also on Tuesday, Judge Walker denied a media request to unseal documents filed in the case, including internal AT&T documents and a declaration from a retired AT&T telecommunications technician.
Steve Jobs Changes His Tune
Red Herring
Steve Jobs has talked the talk and now a growing chorus of critics is urging him to walk the walk...
Derek Slater, activist at the privacy rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Mr. Jobs could demonstrate that he is serious about abolishing copyright protection schemes by selling DRM-free music from independent artists on iTunes. "He should put his music store where his mouth is," says Mr. Slater. "That would be an important step."
Troops' blogs under scrutiny
Fred Reed, Washington Times
Once again, technology has outrun the laws we use to regulate it. Consider the Pentagon's current automated surveillance of troops' blogs. Is it necessary? Legal? Constitutional?..
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit, demanding details of the unit's operations.
In particular, the organization wants to know whether the military is censoring the opinions of troops, which would be a violation of the constitutional right to free speech.
EFF cries foul over YouTube takedowns
Shaun Nichols, IT Week
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has condemned Viacom's demand that YouTube remove 100,000 videos from its site because it believes that much of the material does not violate Viacom copyrights...
"If they are making these kinds of blatant mistakes, who can tell how many fair uses of Viacom content they also targeted in their 100,000 takedowns? Hundreds? Thousands?" said the EFF.
"Wiki can link to controversial documents, judge rules"
The Register
Drugs giant Eli Lilly has failed in its bid to restrict a wiki from linking to documents that could be damaging to its business. The ruling of a New York court said the court could not rule against the internet "in its various manifestations"...
"This ruling makes it clear that Eli Lilly cannot invoke any court orders in its futile efforts to censor these documents off the internet," said EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. "We are disappointed, however, that the judge failed to appreciate that its previous orders constituted prior restraints in violation of the First Amendment."
Discovery Upset About Parody Spanking
David Utter, SecurityProNews
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sparred with Discovery Communications over the media company's efforts to silence a website that criticized a Discovery marketing campaign...
"Once again, a business is trying to use false legal claims to chill criticism," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Fortunately, more and more, the targets of these kinds of threats are fighting back."
For Your Eyes Only?
PBS Now
This week, NOW reports on new evidence suggesting the existence of a secret government program that intercepts millions of private e-mails each day in the name of terrorist surveillance... Featuring EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankson.
Just An Online Minute... EFF Reaches Out To Viacom Victims
Wendy Davis, MediaPost
The civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to be mulling some sort of legal action against Viacom stemming from its recent demand that YouTube remove 100,000 clips - including clips with no connection to Viacom - from the site.
"Were You Caught in the Viacom Takedown?" the EFF asks in its own video, quietly uploaded to YouTube late last week. In the clip, the EFF says it wants to hear from any innocent parties caught in the recent dragnet. "If your video was taken down after complaints from Viacom, but contained either no viacom content at all, or fair use extracts, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would like to hear from you," the company wrote in comments posted with the clip - viewed nearly 9,000 times as of Friday morning.
Why is this man smiling?
Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times
We're just a half a dozen weeks into 2007 and yet it's already turning out to be a banner year for startlingly weird announcements from tech CEOs...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation praises Jobs for taking such a clear public stand on the issue. But they (quite correctly) wonder why, if he's all gung-ho against DRM, Jobs doesn't allow independent labels that are already selling music on the iTunes Store to sell their wares unlocked and unprotected.
EFF takes Viacom to task over YouTube takedown
Greg Sandoval, CNET
A watchdog group is encouraging those wrongly accused of posting pirated Viacom material on YouTube to stand up to the giant conglomerate--even if it means a court fight...
EFF spokeswoman Rebecca Jeschke says lawyers in her organization want to make sure that Viacom didn't go after people with legitimate fair-use claims.
EFF takes Viacom to task over YouTube takedown
Greg Sandoval, CNET
A watchdog group is encouraging those wrongly accused of posting pirated Viacom material on YouTube to stand up to the giant conglomerate--even if it means a court fight...
EFF compared Viacom's actions to fishermen who cast a wide net and mistakenly trap a porpoise. The group suggested in a note on its Web site that some of those accused of copyright violations may need legal help.
"It may make more sense to go to court to assert your rights," EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann wrote on the organization's site.
MySpace suit dismissed by judge in Texas
Ellen Lee, San Francisco Chronicle
A Texas judge has dismissed a lawsuit against MySpace that had blamed the popular Web site for not establishing enough safeguards to protect underage users...
Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that such rules could stifle the Internet.
"The soap box is not liable for what the speaker has said or done," he said. "These services could not exist in a world where the services were liable for what the user had done."
http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid33885.aspx
Clif Garboden, Boston Phoenix
The Phoenix newspapers and thePhoenix.com were major winners in this year's New England Press Association (NEPA) Better Newspaper Competition...
Other Boston first-place awards went to Mike Miliard (Social Issues Feature), and David S. Bernstein (Transportation Reporting). Milliard won for his feature on the emerging importance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Bernstein for writing the truth behind the recent MBTA fare hike.
Judge puts case against Sprint in NSA suit on hold
Reuters
A U.S. judged issued an order on Wednesday putting on hold court proceedings against Sprint Nextel Corp. (S.N: Quote, Profile , Research), which faces a lawsuit claiming it helped the U.S. National Security Agency track international calls.
The stay order by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker will put the lawsuit on hold pending an appellate review of the Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
I love freedom, and I love the EFF
Popgadget
The Popgadget masthead says that we embrace technology, and we're also quite the fans of freedom...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by some cool cats who recognized that computers and directories should be subject to the same Constitutional protections afforded to our homes and filing cabinets. The EFF has done quite a bit to help the technology minded, and we've all benefited from their legal pursuits to protect innovation, free speech, consumer rights, and privacy.
Judge says Internet documents fall outside injunctions' reach
Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times
A federal judge in New York gave websites a partial victory by acknowledging today that when documents are published on the Internet they take on a life of their own, an existence that cannot be reversed by a court...
Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that works for digital rights, praised what he agreed was a split decision. The foundation represented an anonymous individual who was earlier barred by Weinstein from posting web links to the Zyprexa documents.
"My client is pleased because he is no longer part of the injunction," Von Lohmann said in a telephone interview. "The bad news is that others still are restrained and that the judge didn't decide this based on the 1st Amendment."
SCO Vs. Blogger
Daniel Lyons, Forbes.com
For three and a half years, a blogger named Pamela Jones has led a relentless online crusade against software maker SCO Group, posting thousands of articles bashing the company for suing IBM over the Linux operating system...
Other companies have taken legal action against bloggers only to have those actions backfire. In January, Apple was reportedly forced to pay $700,000 to cover the legal expenses of bloggers against whom it had tried to take legal action, thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that defends bloggers.
Rules For The Revolution Podcast
Colette Vogele
Jason is a staff attorney for the EFF specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF's Patent Busting Project and also teaches graduate classes on Cyberlaw at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and School of Information.
In this episode, Jason discusses the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (the "DMCA") and how podcasters and video bloggers are affected by this law enacted nearly 10 years ago.
MFPs anti-counterfeiting measures toughen up
Dan Littman, InfoWorld
Last time we tested similar MFP systems, we found that they adhered to federal anti-counterfeiting guidelines that recommended overlaying all color jobs with the machine's serial number, encoded in big yellow dots. The dots were almost invisible, but not quite... Of course, many anti-counterfeiting measures may never be known, in the interest of keeping those secrets out of criminals' hands. That inherent secrecy caught the eye of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has concerns about some of the anti-counterfeiting measures and the practice of printing encoded information -- including those aforementioned yellow dots -- onto documents to identify the printer that created them.
Lactivist Gets Apology From Pork
Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews
"That'll do pig, that'll do," is how SEM-at-home mom and Lactivist Jennifer Laycock concluded her beef with the National Pork Board after receiving a heartfelt apology and the promise of a donation from to the Mother's Milk Bank of Ohio...
Bloggers, especially in the SEM community, were outraged by the threats in the "lawyer crafted nasty gram," and by one especially egregious accusation to be noted later, and rallied behind Laycock by blogging to everybody they knew, threatening a Google bomb if the National Pork Board didn't back off. And then, the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in on her behalf as well.
SF JUDGE WEIGHS 2 ISSUES IN SURVEILLANCE LAWSUITS
Bay City News
A federal judge who is presiding over more than 30 domestic surveillance lawsuits heard two hours of legal arguments by attorneys on two key procedural issues today but deferred ruling on them...
That lawsuit, known as the Hepting case, was filed against AT&T by four Californians represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Judge To Decide Whether NSA Spy Suit Continues
KC Jones, InformationWeek
The Electronic Frontier Foundation will argue Friday that the lawsuits over the National Security Agency's spy program should proceed while the government asks a higher court to overturn a judge's decision to continue hearing the case.
At issue is whether the U.S. government was within the law to monitor domestic phone calls and other communication originating from parties outside the United States in an effort to quash terrorist activities. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has since said the Bush administration will reverse its stance on domestic spying.
US surveillance of soldiers' blogs sparks lawsuit
John Leyden, TheStreet.com
The US Army is being sued by a privacy group that wants the military to come clean about how it monitors websites and soldiers' blogs for potential military leaks...
"Soldiers should be free to blog their thoughts at this critical point in the national debate on the war in Iraq," EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann said. "If the Army is colouring or curtailing soldiers' published opinions, Americans need to know about that interference."
Soldiers' Blogs Monitored; Group Sues For More Info
KC Jones, InformationWeek
It's no secret that the military monitors soldiers' Web postings, can remove certain items, and will punish those posting content that violates military rules...
"Soldiers should be free to blog their thoughts at this critical point in the national debate on the war in Iraq," EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann said in a prepared statement. "If the Army is coloring or curtailing soldiers' published opinions, Americans need to know about that interference."
EFF to fight for digital rights in Europe
James Niccolai, InfoWorld
Consumers in Europe have another group looking out for their digital rights with the opening of a Brussels office by the U.S. nonprofit group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)...
Erik Josefsson will be the EFF's European Affairs Coordinator. He was previously the head of the Swedish chapter of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, which helped overturn the proposal for a unified patent system in Europe.
Privacy group sues Army over surveillance of soldiers' blogs, Web sites
Todd R. Weiss, ComputerWorld
A U.S. Army unit that monitors thousands of Web sites and soldiers' blogs looking for sensitive military information has been hit with a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) lawsuit by a San Francisco-based privacy group that wants to know more about the monitoring program...
Marcia Hofmann, a Washington-based staff attorney for the EFF, said the FoIA lawsuit is aimed at protecting free speech and privacy and helping soldiers and other Americans understand how and why Web sites and soldiers' blogs are being monitored. "The idea is to get more information on what the Army is doing," Hofmann said. "Some soldier bloggers choose not to blog because of concerns about what they can and can't say" online.
TiVo sees if you skip those ads
David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
TiVo revealed the other day that it's offering TV networks and ad agencies a chance to receive second-by- second data about which programs the company's 4.5 million subscribers are watching and, more importantly, which commercials people are skipping...
"It's a constant struggle to maintain your privacy in the modern era," said Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have entered an era in which more and more information about you is being collected and maintained."
'Electric Slide' on slippery DMCA slope
Daniel Terdiman, CNET
The inventor of the "Electric Slide," an iconic dance created in 1976, is fighting back against what he believes are copyright violations and, more important, examples of bad dancing.
"Someone who performs it noncommercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is noninfringing," Schultz said.
Data Privacy Bill Expected to Target Retailers, Banks
Brian Krebs, Washington Post
Data privacy is likely to be among the hottest technology issues to face Congress this year, in part due to interest from the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee...
While some major corporations -- most recently Microsoft -- have expressed support for some kind of federal consumer privacy law to govern how companies can use, combine and trade consumer data, the effort to produce baseline privacy protections for consumers may set off contentious policy debates, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"The question with this issue -- as with others -- becomes, is this an area where dueling interest groups will make it difficult for Congress to come to an effective solution, or is it something that's moving so fast that anything Congress is likely to do will end up obsolete a year or two from now?" he said.
EFF demands evidence of US army blog censorshop
PC Pro
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Defense, demanding information on how it monitors soldiers' blogs.
Soldiers should be free to blog their thoughts at this critical point in the national debate on the war in Iraq,' said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. 'If the Army is colouring or curtailing soldiers' published opinions, Americans need to know about that interference.
FBI turns to broad new wiretap method
Declan McCullagh, CNET
The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed...
"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."
EFF tells radio station to back off blogger
Grant Gross, InfoWorld
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has come to the aid of a liberal blogger whose Web site was taken down after a radio station complained that critiques containing on-air clips violated its copyright...
The EFF threatened a lawsuit against ABC and KSFO if they further attempted to shut down Spocko with Digital Millennium Copyright Act threats. "ABC/KSFO's complaints amount to nothing more than an attempt to silence an effective critic," EFF lawyer Matt Zimmerman wrote. "EFF ... will vigorously defend Spocko against misguided efforts to limit his First Amendment rights."
Google and YouTube: A Catch-22
Catherine Holahan, Businessweek.com
Legal action from News Corp. concerning leaked episodes of the prime-time drama 24 has set the clock ticking for Google...
However, Google does have a quiet history of revealing information about users accused of copyright violations, says Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has been involved with subpoena fights concerning Google and its users. Typically, von Lohmann says, Google gives users 20 days' notice and an opportunity to respond before handing over information. In YouTube's privacy policy, the company indicates it will release identifiable information that it believes is necessary to enforce its Terms of Use, which bans uploading copyrighted material, or protect itself against liability and "third-party claims or allegations," among other things.
Media outlets battle it out over free-speech rights
Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY
In a dispute between the "new media" of the Internet and the "old media" of broadcasting, liberal bloggers and conservative talk-radio hosts are accusing each other of trampling the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech...
Matt Zimmerman, an EFF lawyer, says the first Web host surrendered too quickly to ABC's "saber-rattling." Spocko's use of the KSFO content comes "squarely" under federal law that protects "fair use" of copyrighted material for criticism and commentary, Zimmerman says.
RIAA Lawsuit Against XM To Proceed
Erik Sass, Media Daily News
A U.S. district judge has allowed a major lawsuit brought by the recording industry against XM Satellite Radio to proceed...
In a May interview, Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who practices digital copyright law, described the RIAA lawsuit as "a stretch." He thinks AHRA will ultimately protect XM: "The Audio Home Recording Act--which the lawsuit conspicuously fails to mention--gives XM and Sirius a pretty good defense. As far as I know, every one of these devices was designed to conform to the AHRA."
Court Finds NJ Users Can Expect Privacy from ISPs
Associated Press
Computer users in New Jersey can expect that personal information they give their Internet service providers be treated as private, a state appellate court decided Monday in the first such case considered in the state...
Yes, this indicates that New Jersey, like a lot of states, is ahead of the curve on Internet privacy,'' said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group.
Bankston also praised the decision for recognizing anonymity as a core free speech right.
Your Right to Time-Shift Is Under Attack
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired News
The latest attempt by the recording industry to take away our right to time-shift (i.e. record and play later) digital audio streams recieved a boost today from U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts, who saw merit in the labels' claims that "XM directly infringes on their exclusive distribution rights by letting consumers record songs onto special receivers marketed as 'XM + MP3' players"...
Senator Diane Feinstein's re-introduced PERFORM Act would make digital recording products such as XM's and others yet to come illegal from the get-go, and would even bar legally-licensed online radio stations from streaming in the MP3 format. Luckily, the EFF is all over Feinstein about this, with a special page where you can let your own Senators know exactly how you feel about the PERFORM Act.
San Francisco expands public surveillance
Dan Goodin, The Register UK
In a controversial decision that pits civil libertarians against urban dwellers fed up with crime, San Francisco officials have agreed to almost double the number of surveillance cameras on city streets...
Several civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue there is no evidence that cameras deter crime. They pointed to statistics that showed an increase in illegal incidents at half of the locations where monitoring has been implemented. They also contend that such programs are open to abuse by crooked law enforcement members.
Proposed DRM legislation criticized as too harsh
Grant Gross, InfoWorld
Consumer rights groups have voiced opposition to legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress last week that would require Internet broadcasters to deploy DRM (digital rights management) technology to prevent listeners from making unauthorized copies of music files...
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Public Knowledge oppose the legislation. The bill would be a "backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio," the EFF said. The PERFORM Act would prohibit digital and satellite radio services from offering TiVO-like recording options, the EFF said.
WIPO Negotiators Try To Bear Down On Broadcasting Treaty
William New, Intellectual Property Watch
World Intellectual Property Organization officials negotiating this week on how to improve broadcasters' and cablecasters' ability to protect their signals have attempted to move into a deeper debate using an informal chair's text of a draft treaty...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the treaty raises fundamental questions for the rights of public and would restrict access to information in the public domain. Some broadcasters, such as from Japan, countered that absence of greater rights would weaken broadcasters and lead to less information and entertainment being made available to the public.
Leaked Documents Spur First-Amendment Debate
Snigdha Prakash, NPR
A federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., is considering whether bloggers are entitled to the same free-speech protections given to reporters for newspapers and other media. The case involves leaked documents belonging to the pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly.
Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco will argue that the order to shut down the Web links violated the protections of the First Amendment.
"Courts in the United States, thanks to the First Amendment, are not allowed to issue what are called 'prior restraints,' Von Lohmann said. "After all, the Pentagon Papers were also allegedly improperly obtained. And the courts have said over and over again, 'It doesn't matter if the documents were improperly obtained. Courts do not issue stop-the-presses orders against people who happen to get the documents after they had been released.'"
Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech
Tom Zeller, Jr., New York Times
A showdown is scheduled for a federal courtroom in Brooklyn tomorrow afternoon, where words like "First Amendment" and "freedom of speech" and "prior restraint" are likely to mix seamlessly with references to "BitTorrent" and "Wiki"...
The case has attracted the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the venerable digital rights group based in San Francisco, and one of its lawyers, Fred von Lohmann, who is now representing an anonymous Internet user caught up in the legal fracas.
"One of the core missions of the foundation's 16-year history has been to establish that when you go online, you take with you all the same civil rights with you had with you in prior media," said Mr. von Lohmann. "But of course, you need to fight for that principle."
www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/13/sanfrancisco_surveillance_cameras/
Civil rights groups slam San Francisco surveillance expansion Dan Goodin, The Register UK
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are spearheading opposition to a plan by the San Francisco Police Department to install 25 new surveillance cameras throughout the city.
Bill Would Force Webcasters' DRM Hand
Roy Mark, Internetnews.com
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein re-introduced Thursday her controversial legislation to mandate DRM formats for all streaming media services. A similar bill failed in the last session of Congress under pressure from consumer advocates and the electronics industry...
Both Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation led the fight to defeat the PERFORM Act in 2006, and Sohn predicted Feinstein may again find tough sledding since new Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) opposes technology standards.
Trying to censor blogger
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
A series of events involving a local liberal blogger, a San Francisco conservative radio station and the reaction of two of the larger corporate advertisers in the country -- Bank of America and MasterCard -- is revealing how slippery freedom of speech has become in the digital age...
"This is prototypical fair use of copyrighted material," said Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with the San Francisco civil liberties and digital privacy organization. EFF is not representing Spocko, but has reviewed his situation and is monitoring it. "Bloggers shouldn't have to be worried about being sued every time they post a screen shot from 'The Simpsons.' "
House Seat Hangs by a Byte
Kim Zetter, Wired News
As the 110th Congress settles into the Capitol building this month, one congressman won't be able to get too comfortable in his chair, with a controversy over the electronic voting machines that put him in office boiling down to a battle over the source code...
"The source code is available, yet there is no easy and ready way to get access to it or for someone to go in and look at the machine and challenge them," says Matt Zimmerman, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has joined Jennings in her dispute of the election through a separate lawsuit representing voters. "And now we're left trying to convince a court that it would be a really good idea to take a look at it."
Wiki Writer Goes to Court Over Freedom to Link
Shreema Mehta, The New Standard
An anonymous writer who linked from a collaborative website to a drug company's internal documents is appealing a court order demanding the removal of the links...
Preventing a citizen-journalist from posting links to important health information on a public wiki violates the First Amendment," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann in a press statement. "Eli Lilly's efforts to censor these documents off the Internet are particularly outrageous in light of the information reported by the New York Times, which suggests that doctors and patients who use Zyprexa need to know the information contained in those documents."
EFF Says First Amendment Protects Links To Leaked Corporate Documents
K.C. Jones, InformationWeek
An advocacy group claims the First Amendment allows citizen journalists to link from public Web pages to electronic copies of damaging internal documents...
"Preventing a citizen-journalist from posting links to important health information on a public wiki violates the First Amendment," EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann said in a prepared statement. "Eli Lilly's efforts to censor these documents off the Internet are particularly outrageous in light of the information reported by The New York Times, which suggests that doctors and patients who use Zyprexa need to know the information contained in those documents."
Blog Lands KSFO-AM In Hot Water With Advertisers
Joe Vazquez, CBS 5 (San Francisco)
At least two major corporations have pulled their advertisements from radio station KSFO-AM after bloggers publicized clips of broadcasts in which hosts took aim at politicians and a listener believed to be Muslim...
Matt Zimmerman with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Spocko is well within his rights to post the audio clips, under a legal doctrine known as "Fair Use."
"If you are engaged in criticism or commentary or teaching -- those kinds of activities -- then it's acceptable to use copyrighted works to further those aims," Zimmerman said.
Video leads parade as old media and new media hook up
Jefferson Graham and Michelle Kessler, USA TODAY
A year ago, CBS President Leslie Moonves came to the Consumer Electronics Show to trumpet CBS' new video alliance with Google...
Many anti-piracy protections rob consumers of the right to legitimately use entertainment they've paid for, says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group.
For example, it's illegal to make a digital copy of a copy-protected DVD, even if it's just for backup, he says. And TV companies don't want consumers to be able to record a copy of a TV show on a DVR, then transfer it to another DVR or a portable device without paying a fee, he says.
Hacker: Blu-ray, HD DVD copy protection cracked
Robert McMillan, IDG News
A computer hacker claims to have broken the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) encryption specification used to control unauthorized copying on HD-DVD and Blu-ray video players...
By cracking AACS, Muslix64 may have violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits users from circumventing copy-protection tools without the permission of the copyright holder, said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Still, the software seems to have been written out of a legitimate sense of frustration with onerous copy-protection mechanisms, von Lohmann said. "He went out and bought a fancy new product that he thought would improve his experience and despite the fact that he's a legitimate buyer, it didn't work."
Face Recognition for Online Photo Searches Sparks Privacy Fears
Mason Inman, National Geographic
A new type of search engine using facial recognition technology could soon be able to pinpoint images of a person among the billions of photos posted online-even if their name does not appear...
Lee Tien is an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet watchdog group that focuses on privacy and civil liberties.
"Photos [posted online] are effectively anonymous now," Tien said, unless they are labeled with some sort if identifying text. "But if Polar Rose works the way they say it will, that's all going to change."
Experts say changes in e-voting likely to come
Grant Gross, ComputerWorld
Rules requiring independent audit mechanisms for electronic voting machines are likely coming, but the changes won't happen overnight, a group of advocates said Friday.
More than 18,000 undervotes in a still-disputed Florida congressional election from November show the need for independent audit mechanisms, said panelists at an event sponsored by several advocacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Common Cause.
The legal rights to your 'Second Life' avatar
Daniel Terdiman, CNET
A Second Life land developer has convinced YouTube to pull down an off-color video of her virtual self being harassed during an interview, raising novel questions about the legal rights of virtual-world participants...
To Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issues surrounding the DMCA complaint are pretty cut and dried.
"Since the general theory (in Second Life) is that you own what you create, she completely owns the copyright in her avatar," said Schultz. "But that said, she absolutely has no rights under fair use to stop people from taking screenshots or screen captures of her avatar in Second Life."
Signal-Based or Nothing, Some Say at US Broadcasting Treaty Roundtable
John T. Aquino, Intellectual Property Watch
At the 3 January roundtable discussion concerning the work at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on a broadcasters' rights treaty, many of the more than 50 participants were vocal in their opposition, with some in support...
Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation indicated that the draft proposal focuses on the rights of recording and intellectual property rights and urged the US delegation to pursue a signal-protection approach.
Op-Ed: The Digital Give And Take
Derek Slater, Tom Paine
Many progressives are partying like it's 1992 in the wake of the November election. But when it comes to technology and civil liberties policy, the newly elected Congress presents both new opportunities and new challenges. The truth is, neither Democrats nor Republicans are universally good or bad across all digital rights issues...
That's just a sampling of technology and civil liberties issues likely to come up in 2007. For continuing updates on new legislation, check out EFF's blog and Action Center.
When a Silicon Valley law firm dies, where do its records go?
Anne Broache, CNET
A prominent law firm that represented scores of Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capital firms in its heyday may have dissolved amid financial troubles a few years ago. But its records are poised to live on in digital form for years to come--and some former clients are raising questions about privacy implications...
Even so, requiring former clients to "opt out" rather than "opt in" doesn't seem quite right, said David Sobel, a senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "A law firm's clients don't expect that their sensitive files will be made available to third-parties in this way, so they should not be given the burden of protecting their interests," he said in an e-mail interview.
New Websites To Watch Out For
Erik Rosales, ABC 7 News (San Francisco)
Attorney Fred Von Lohmann, with San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation says video sharing sites are filling the gaps abandoned by Youtube, which since its inception, has banned nudity and allows users to flag content they feel is inappropriate.
Von Lohmann says sites that host user generated content are not required by law to monitor or even screen the material before it goes up.
