A federal appeals court dealt a blow to the Obama administration Friday when it refused to block a judge from admitting top secret evidence in a lawsuit weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress, as President George W. Bush did, and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims the TSP went further, and accuses the nations' telecommunication companies of funneling all electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. However, as part of the spy bill approved in July, the government immunized the telcos from lawsuits accusing them of being complicit with the Bush administration.

Apparently, Amazon won't fight the publishing industry on the issue of whether the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function violates copyright...

Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate group for the rights of Web users and technology companies, said he was grateful that Amazon went out of its way to make the point that the company didn't believe text-to-speech technology violated copyright.

"Nevertheless, Amazon decided to allow copyright owners to make the decisions themselves whether to use the feature," von Lohmann said. "They are entitled to do that. The issue of text-to-speech will have to wait for another innovator."

The Obama administration vigorously defended congressional legislation late Wednesday that immunizes U.S. telecommunication companies from lawsuits about their participation in the Bush administration's domestic spy program...

Walker is weighing a challenge to the immunity legislation in a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco. Congress crafted the bill after Walker refused to dismiss separate challenges brought by EFF accusing the nation's telecoms of violating the rights of millions of Americans for allegedly funneling electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

The Obama administration has asked a federal judge in San Francisco to uphold a law aimed at dismissing suits against telecommunications companies that cooperated with President George W. Bush's wiretapping program...

Cindy Cohn, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who represents AT&T customers in the lead case before Walker, said she was disappointed.

"It's unfortunate that the Obama administration has taken the position that it's OK for the president to decide whether millions of ordinary Americans get their day in court," Cohn said. "That's exactly the kind of presidential power that candidate Obama was critical of the Bush administration for."

The Authors Guild has come in for a fair amount of ridicule since their executive director, Paul Aiken, claimed that the speech-to-text feature of Amazon's new Kindle 2 violated copyright law, telling the Wall Street Journal: "They don't have the right to read a book out loud"...

Michael Kwun of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that it doesn't, for two reasons. First, he says, a "derivative work" must be a work of creative authorship: He cites the copyright statute's definition of "derivative work" as "a work based upon one or more preexisting works . . . which, as a whole, represent[s] an original work of authorship."

A federal judge in San Francisco is raising questions about the constitutionality of a law designed to dismiss suits against telecommunications companies accused of cooperating with government wiretapping...

The point of the 1944 ruling, said the phone customers' lawyer, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was that "Congress is supposed to write the laws. Congress isn't supposed to abdicate the ability to write those laws to the president."

It's easy to understand why the United States is losing ground in the race to build cost-effective broadband services across the nation. The latest reason: a trade group of longtime losers—the Recording Industry of America—wants Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to protect them from their own music customers...

The RIAA's lawsuits, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have been "ineffective and unconstitutional." Fred von Lohmann, the EFF's senior staff attorney, said the trade group's campaign has been—by any measure—a failure. The lawsuits, he said, have not reduced unauthorized file-sharing and have not gotten a single artist paid.

Last month, federal district court judge Nancy Gertner granted a request by grad student Joel Tenenbaum to Webcast his trial for allegedly sharing music files online. She ruled that the "Internet generation" should be able to virtually attend the proceedings via the Web. The Recording Industry Association of America filed an emergency appeal, arguing that a Webcast would hurt its case.

The controversy drew the attention of civil rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief, as well as major media organizations like The Associated Press.

Korbel Champagne Cellars will ask a Sonoma County judge next week to make Comcast Corp. identify Internet customers who criticized the wine company in a Web forum.

The case shows that Internet users should be careful what they say in anonymous Web forums, said Matt Zimmerman, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that defends free speech online.

“Even if you think you are speaking anonymously, you are leaving digital footprints that could ‘out’ you,” he said. “You could still be held liable.”

A proposed U.S. law would require Internet service providers to store information about every user of their services and keep that data for at least two years, in a bid to crack down on Internet-based predators and child pornographers...

"Data retention proposals are sort of like zombies, in that they're kind of easy to knock down, but they tend to come back," Bankston said.

That, at least, is how it initially feels to read BlockShopper -- a site whose new Seattle portal currently features such headlines as Senior pastor acquires Sammamish 3BD, Microsoft Corp. lawyer spends in Issaquah, and Medical couple gets 4BD in Seattle...

Among those who didn't like it was whe big law firm Jones Day, which sued BlockShopper for trademark infringement after the site ran items on real estate deals involving two of its lawyers. The firm's suit was roundly criticized by First Amendment advocates, and BlockShopper had the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups.

A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case...

Soon thereafter, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen jointly filed an amici curiae brief on behalf of BlockShopper, pointing out the obvious: "linking is what web sites do—that is, after all, why it is called the 'World Wide Web'."

A proposed bill in the Nevada State Legislature would make it a crime to do legitimate research on security weaknesses in radio frequency identification, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said on Friday.

Privacy advocates are lashing out at a renewed effort by lawmakers to impose requirements on ISPs and wireless network operators to keep records about the identities of Internet users...

"These data retention proposals unnecessarily threaten the privacy and anonymous speech rights of every law-abiding internet user," EFF Senior Attorney Kevin Bankston told InternetNews.com. The law would "create vast new troves of data vulnerable not only to government overreaching but also to any civil litigant wielding a subpoena," he added.

An appellate court in Boston has stayed a trial judge's order authorizing a Webcast of the legal proceedings in the record industry's lawsuit against grad student Joel Tenenbaum...

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing Tenenbaum's request. "What transpires in these courts should be available to all members of the public, whether they can travel to the courthouse or not," the group argued.

In a filling with the US Copyright Office, Mozilla and Skype have added their voices of support to a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act related to iPhone jailbreaking.

Mozilla has thrown its support behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation's push to have the U.S. Copyright Office allow iPhone jailbreaking.

"It's quite simple, really," Dr. Branom tells Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange. "We're just going to show you some films"...

Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, guesses the clips were culled thanks to YouTube's Content ID system, an automated filter that seeks "fingerprints" encoded onto copyrighted video or audio.

Facebook, the popular social networking site where people share photos and personal updates with friends and acquaintances, lost some face on Wednesday...

“If I post something on your wall, and then I decide to close my account, what happens to that wall post?” said Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. “Is that my data or your data? That’s a very tricky issue, and it’s one that hasn’t come up a whole lot in the past.”

The anonymous bloggers of Uptown Update, and What the Helen, won't be unmasked anytime soon...

The blogs and Buena Park Neighbors block club are not directly involved in the Fix Wilson Yard lawsuit. They are being represented pro-bono by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that defends the First Amendment rights of those who use the Internet and other digital media to exercise their freedom of speech. The civil liberties group is working to quash the subpoenas.

Mozilla Corp. is backing a move that would nullify copyright infringement charges against people who "jailbreak" their iPhones, a practice that Apple Inc. considers against the law.

In comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office, the maker of Firefox said it supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in its request for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The EFF wants the Copyright Office to let users jailbreak their phones without fear of copyright infringement penalties.

There are plenty of people who can muster outrage at Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman who is the latest example of win-at-any-cost athletes. But I’d prefer to see him as at the cutting edge of another scourge — the growing encroachment on privacy...

Perhaps a more direct explanation is that data collection is part of what Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls “the surveillance business model.” That is, there is money to be made from knowing your customers well — with a depth unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track obsessively online behavior.

Richard Acton-Maher of San Francisco was in nearby Berkeley last month and wanted to meet friends for lunch. Instead of making calls to see who was around, he looked at a digital map on his iPhone that plotted their locations...

Besides competition, Google’s effort to turn mobile phones into tracking devices faces criticism from privacy advocates. Useful for friends and family, location data would also be valuable to the government, said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a not-for-profit organization focused on civil-liberties.

Despite President Obama's vow to open government more than ever, the Justice Department is defending Bush administration decisions to keep secret many documents about domestic wiretapping, data collection on travelers and U.S. citizens, and interrogation of suspected terrorists...

To withhold some material, the FBI cited discretionary FOIA exemptions and ones that require balancing privacy and public interests. David Sobel, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates civil liberties in cyberspace and brought the lawsuit, said those decisions might come out differently under the new guidelines.

Last December, the Electronic Frontier Foundation proposed an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would make legal jailbreaking phones--the process of hacking phones to allow running third-party applications from other sources. Exemptions to the DMCA can be proposed to the Copyright Office every three years, and are valid for three years. In response, Apple has now filed a 27-page argument (PDF link) that jailbreaking should not be given an exemption.

Apple has remained pretty quiet, on the whole, concerning the fact that people "jailbreak" their iPhones to allow them to run non-Apple-approved software on the devices (or to use them on other mobile carriers). However, in responding to an attempt by the EFF to get jailbreaking (and other phone unlocking efforts) declared clear of any potential copyright claims, Apple has now officially said they believe that jailbreaking the iPhone is infringing on their copyright. This is troubling for a number of reasons.

Apple recently told the U.S. Copyright Office that it believes iPhone jailbreaking is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and infringes on its copyright, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF is trying to get the Copyright Office to grant a DMCA exemption on behalf of iPhone owners who have chosen to jailbreak their iPhones, or bypass the restriction Apple places on standard iPhones that only allows the installation of applications from approved sources: the App Store. In its response to the Copyright Office, Apple disagreed that such an exemption was proper because the very act of jailbreaking the iPhone results in copyright infringement.

Apple has told the US Copyright Office that jailbreaking an iPhone should be illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).

Apple's defense of its practice of locking down the iPhone to software and services provided only by itself and its partner AT&T came in response to petitions for DCMA exemptions that were proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in December 2008.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed requests with the US Copyright Office to exempt activities from legal threats under the DMCA, one of which attacks Apple's secured software business model on the iPhone.

There is something deeply exasperating about the debate, exposed today, about whether unlocking an iPhone violates Apple’s copyright on the cellphone’s software. There’s a real issue at stake, but it isn’t fundamentally about copyrights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a filing to the Copyright Office, argues that the government should allow iPhone owners to circumvent technical barriers meant to keep them from changing the phone’s software, a process called jailbreaking. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans people from defeating technical protections for copyrighted materials (such as the encryption on DVDs). The act requires the government to consider exemptions to this ban every three years.

Artist Shepard Fairey says that he has distributed more than 300,000 copies of his iconic poster of President Obama with the word "Hope" written underneath and that it has inspired countless other versions. Now, the 38-year-old Los Angeles street artist, who says he used an Associated Press photograph as a "visual reference" for his piece, is in the middle of a copyright battle that goes to the heart of how media is made, remixed and mashed up.

Given the notoriety of Fairey's iconic poster, "it is kind of the perfect storm," said Michael Kwun, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital advocacy organization. "It raises questions about what we as a culture and a legal society feel is proper."

The world’s biggest record companies sued college students, a 12-year-old girl and a dead woman and still failed to stamp out music piracy. Now they’re turning to Internet service providers...

“There has been an international push by the rights holders to pursue a similar strategy across the world,” said Danny O’Brien, international outreach coordinator for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates expanded digital rights for consumers. “The end goal is the same: co-opt Internet service providers as copyright cops.”

In the lead-up to FTC "Town Hall" meetings on digital rights management, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a statement calling on the U.S. government to "mitigate the damage that digital rights management technologies cause consumers."

At dawn on January 20, some of the earliest of millions of inauguration-goers stationed along Pennsylvania Avenue might have caught a glimpse of a truck—or three—backing up to the White House to take deliveries of history: calendars, disks, executive orders, hard drives, memos, notes, photographs, tapes, and any other records former President George W. Bush had not turned over to the United States National Archives and Records Administration by then...

“Increasingly there is a broad array of alternative modes of communication that all of us use in all aspects of our lives, and the concept of one e-mail account that’s used exclusively for one purpose is really starting to erode due to mobility and a variety of other factors,” says David Sobel, who litigates FOIA cases as a senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that seeks to protect civil liberties threatened by emerging technologies.

Subpoenas seeking the identity of anonymous bloggers opposed to the Wilson Yard project are the latest salvo in a decade-long fight over the development, one that plays off class warfare and dueling political agendas over a sprawling tract of land in Uptown...

"Regardless of what the motivations are, there's certainly a chilling effect as a result of subpoenas sent out specifically targeting sites criticizing this development," said lawyer Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for free speech and privacy rights that represents the bloggers.

In a settlement announced today, a rodeo association has agreed to pay the animal rights group SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness) $25,000 to resolve a lawsuit filed this summer in which SHARK accused the cowboys of abusing the takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to silence criticism...

The dispute resolution stipulations—which EFF's announcement describes as providing a "new model for handling takedown notices"—may actually be the most interesting aspect of the agreement.

A rodeo association has agreed to pay $25,000 to an animal welfare group to settle a lawsuit over the improper removal of videos from YouTube that showed roped calves being dragged off to die and tasers being used on tame horses to get them to buck...

The group that posted them, Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the rodeo group last summer. The group sued for misrepresentation, alleging that the videos could not have infringed any copyright because the rodeos themselves weren't copyrightable, the EFF said.

Holden Lenz had just learned to walk when—on Feb. 7, 2007—he stepped into the front lines of the copyright wars...

“Companies that depend on user-generated content —and MySpace, Facebook, AOL, virtually every major Internet company incorporates user-generated content —they create a new and more vibrant public sphere,” says Corynne McSherry, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, who is representing Lenz in her lawsuit against UMG. “We have a whole new set of channels of communication. It’s good for con sumers and good for citizens.”

Lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation that might make it more difficult for federal judges to scuttle lawsuits in which the government claims state secrets might be exposed...

The public became familiar with the privilege when the Bush administration invoked it in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit accusing the nation's telecoms of funneling Americans' electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

A computer security researcher is set to demonstrate this weekend how simple it is to read and clone RFID tags from U.S. government-issued passport cards...

Hugh D'Andrade, an activist with the privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation, said any "average tech geek" easily could use the reader to steal passport data. He said the problem could prove particularly worrisome from a privacy perspective if there are multiple people carrying the passport card at a crowded event, such as a political rally.

"[RFID is] a great technology if you want to be able to scan items easily at a store," D'Andrade told SCMagazineUS.com on Friday. "EFF thinks it's a really risky technology when it's connected to a personal ID that the government issues. There are concerns that we could be building a world where people can be constantly tracked all the time."

Before you authors get upset, never fear: Google is making 1.5 million books available, it announced today, that are in the public domain. There's a lot of good stuff, including everything by Charles Dickens and (pre-zombified) Jane Austen...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks there are still issues to consider. The foundation points to "Google and the Future of Books," an article in the New York Review of Books by Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library.

Consumer rights groups in California are protesting what they claim is an attempt by the state Department of Motor Vehicles to sneak in via the backdoor a fingerprint and facial recognition system for issuing driver's licenses in the state...

Unlike other forms of identification, such as a driver's license number, a biometric identifier such as a facial image or thumb print, cannot be changed in the event of a data breach, potentially resulting in lasting problems for victims, added Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. "Basically, any kind of biometric is a piece of information that is uniquely linked to you and cannot be revoked," he said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is coming to the rescue of YouTube users. They feel YouTube and Warner Brothers have crossed the line when it comes to content issues and disagreements when, for example, they remove a young girl's video of her singing "Winter Wonderland" - which is copyrighted content.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering to represent YouTube users who wish to fight back when their videos are removed from the user-generated video service at the request of media companies such as record labels.

If you're the sort of person who reads Ars Technica regularly, there's a good chance that at some point in the past few months, someone has forwarded you a link to Corey Vidal's YouTube a capella tribute to film composer John Williams—a four part harmony in which the saga of the original Star Wars trilogy is recapped to a medley of Williams' celebrated scores. If you've tried to pull it up recently, however, you've instead encountered YouTube's Pink Bar of Doom, informing you that "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WARNER MUSIC GROUP"...

In a post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog today, attorney Fred von Lohmann warns that such filtering threatens to squelch amateur online creativity—and he's looking for a few good clients who are prepared to fight back.

Last month, we were a bit surprised by claims from an NBC Universal representative that filtering technology in use today could distinguish between fair use and infringement when it came to content online...

Now, the EFF is clearly looking for a test case, asking those whose videos have been taken down, despite clear fair use -- such as the teenaged girl who's video of herself singing "Winter Wonderland" was removed -- to contact the EFF.

In a victory for free speech and political parody, Savitri Durkee, Director of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, has successfully defended her right to publish a website satirizing the Union Square Partnership (USP) and their efforts to turn the historic Union Square pavilion into an upscale restaurant...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a well known civil liberties defense group working in this case with the law firms of Mayer Brown and Gross & Belsky, LLP, filed a response to USP's complaint on Durkee's behalf, pointing out that Durkee's parody is protected under the First Amendment and fair use doctrine.

What if China seized the domain names of U.S. Web sites promoting religions that China bans? Or what if (horrors of horrors!) Nebraska seized and shut down the domain name law.com because its cutting-edge legal content, that state believed, encourages frivolous litigation in violation of state law?...

"I think in this case, ultimately, even if the state here won in the sense that the forfeiture order was proper, it isn't the end of the story," said Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Another important part of this story is the role of third-party intermediaries that make Internet discourse possible."

An agreement negotiated in secrecy among governments and industry representatives and known to the public only through leaked documents and the efforts of privacy activists may sound so 2008...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have issued a call for some of that fabled new-administration transparency for the notorious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), asking that background documents on the agreement be released as per the Freedom of Information Act.