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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."

The "wow" starts with Wednesday's IT Blogwatch: in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation wins against warrentless U.S. email snooping.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 "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.

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.