Myxer doesn't seem to be worried about being sued by major record labels...

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was created in 1998, and back then, Congress didn't predict there would be these massive content sharing sites like YouTube -- and according to Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the copyright owners of today are not satisfied with the 1998 rules. And the lawsuits are an effort to re-negotiate the deal.

''The service providers are saying we can't do the policing for you. You have to police the content,'' according to von Lohmann.

Companies that bundle music, movies and games with digital rights management software must prominently disclose information about such software to consumers, a Federal Trade Commission official warned last week...

Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the FTC that digital rights management software threatens consumers' ability to use media. "Fair use means that you can do things like buy a CD and take it home and play it on various different devices and play it in the background in your kitchen and your toddler can dance to it and then you can put a video of the toddler dancing up on YouTube," McSherry said. "Unfortunately, DRM (digital rights management) can interfere with those expectations."

Cell phone apps like Loopt and the new Google Latitude allow you to track your friends' physical locations, and be tracked in return...

But here's the kicker: As Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the safeguards in place are only company policy, not a legal requirement. And policies can change.

AT&T Inc., the nation's largest Internet service provider, will start sending warnings to its subscribers when music labels and movie studios allege that they are trafficking in pirated material, according to an executive...

AT&T and other participating ISPs are doing more for copyright owners than they are legally obliged to, according to Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, they do have an obligation to have a policy in place to kick off repeat offenders, he said.

New Zealand agreed this week to reconsider a controversial law that cut off Internet access to people accused of copyright violations...

How could a democratic government consider cutting off Internet access for people who haven’t been convicted of a copyright violation? Danny O’Brien, the international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that New Zealand changed its copyright law to be in accordance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the U.S., but then chose to interpret the language differently than the U.S.

A skeptical person might presume that the new Freedom of Information Act policy announced by Attorney General Eric Holder on March 19 declaring that agencies should “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” is a rhetorical posture without much practical significance...

In one case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a court to stay a proceeding and to order the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice to reconsider their denial of requested records by employing the new Holder guidelines. Those agencies opposed the idea. But in a March 23 opinion (pdf), Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California granted the EFF motion.

Under pressure from the big record labels, several countries around the world are cracking down hard on illegal file-sharers with a "three strikes, you're out" policy — and the United States may be next...

"We ... have now an increasing amount of power passed on to the hands of the copyright holders," says Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital-rights group.

"It's cutting out the middleman, which the Internet is very good at, except in this case the middleman is a judge," O'Brien continued. "All they have to do is accuse you three times and then you're off. There's no checking to see if the evidence is good."

We've been covering the ongoing legal brouhaha between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over whether or not his iconic Obama poster was copyright infringement of an Associated Press photo -- with most of the focus being on whether or not the use was protected by fair use. However, the EFF is noting something quite odd (and quite troubling) in the AP's countersuit against Fairey: it's claiming that his post violates the DMCA.

When a high school cheerleader in northeastern Pennsylvania learned that she might face criminal charges after investigators reported finding a nude photo of her on someone else’s cellphone, she was more confused than frightened at being caught up in a case of “sexting”: the increasingly popular phenomenon of nude or seminude photos sent over wireless phones...

Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that studies technology issues, said such cases also raise thorny legal issues around the searching of students’ cellphones, many of which are seized when they are used during class.

“If they confiscate the phone, that’s reasonable to hold it for the day and return it,” Mr. Tien said. “But there’s a serious question of whether that justifies going through the cellphone.”

Thousands of user-created videos, rather just their audio tracks, are once again being pulled from YouTube. Due to the ongoing copyright dispute between Warner Music Group and YouTube, tens of thousands of amateur videos have been removed from the site. Users believe their videos fall under the category of "Fair Use", but failed negotiations between YouTube and Warner Music have resulted in all content being affected...

Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the EFF said, "Thousands of videos disappeared. Either [YouTube] turned off the audio, or they pulled the video." The majority of the videos which have been removed contain clips of Warner Music songs in the background of slideshows, family videos, or are even videos of artists who simply cover Warner Music's tracks.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has pledged to review the transparency of its trade negotiations after criticism over its recent decision to withhold information on an intellectual-property trade agreement...

The pledge to review transparency comes after three groups, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking details about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a trade pact being negotiated among the U.S. and several other countries.

After Stella escaped from the yard of her Los Altos home for the third time, her owner decided she needed a way to track the husky-mix dog...

"Now you have cheap surveillance...think of how easy this makes it for an ex who wants to harass somebody or a neighbor who wants to get some dirt on you," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights watchdog group

In November 2007, the Songwriters Association of Canada shocked the music industry and many Canadians by proposing music file sharing be legalized. The proposal was based on the premise that file sharing was not going away, that lawsuits do more harm than good and the continued emphasis on digital locks to control copying has failed completely...

The voluntary approach – which resembles elements of a plan the Electronic Frontier Foundation began promoting in 2003 – should remove the consumer concerns associated with stiff monthly fees for non-music sharers. While some artists may reject the plan, the SAC is betting most will participate given the opportunity to benefit from a new source of revenue.

For students the world over, summertime marks the end of exams and a few months away from the books, tutorials, and professors. Harsh reality though soon comes knocking in the shape of economic reality and it also usually means, for most, the need to find a summer job...

This year the programme, which is now in its fifth year, will match 1,000 students from 98 countries to 150 open source projects. The projects include lots of familiar names like Blender, MySQL, Apache, the Berkman Centre at Harvard, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, OpenMRS, Sahana and even Google.

To commemorate Sunshine Week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)last week launched a search tool that allows the public to closely examine thousands of pages of government documents the organization has obtained through litigation and FOIA requests. The documents relate to a wide range of cutting-edge technology issues and government policies that affect civil liberties and personal privacy, according to a release from the organization.

In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,” and she posted it on YouTube...

“Thousands of videos disappeared,” said Fred von Lohmann, staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group that asked affected YouTube users to contact it. “Either they turned off the audio, or they pulled the video.”

Seventeen-year-old Natalie Tracey recently adjusted her cell phone plan to accommodate her growing text-messaging addiction. But the Sacramento high school senior had never heard of anyone at her school "sexting" - sending a nude photo via cell phone...

Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation, said law-enforcement agencies that bring felony charges against minors are misusing the federal child pornography laws, which he said were written to protect children from adult predators.

"We may not want teenagers to engage in this behavior," Tien said, "but police officers and schoolteachers and judges should not feel like they need to bring up criminal charges on these kids.

"It's become a frenzy of people who are trying to out-moralize one another and come out strongly against it," he added. "I'm hoping people will come to their senses and this will result in less sexting but, more importantly, less overreacting by the authorities."

The struggling music industry is looking to new technology solutions that could help it regain some lost ground and make music consumption more convenient and affordable for fans...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based nonprofit founded in 1990, has come out strongly in favor of such an “all you can eat” subscription model, saying it fairly compensates creators. The foundation estimates such a model could collect $3 billion annually.

Research is the backbone of the security industry but the legal climate has become so adverse that researchers have had to worry about injunctions, FBI visits, and even arrest...

Despite their knowledge of this significant vulnerability, the researchers were less worried about attackers finding out and more worried about being sued by Internet service providers embarrassed by the flaw. To head off the problem, they — with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — were able to get Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation to sign non-disclosure agreements.

There’s a name for how cruel people can get given a little anonymity on the internet. It’s called “online disinhibition effect” and the resulting venom can ruin your day or worse, destroy your good name. Bob looks at the fraught relationship on the web between reputation, privacy and the law...

BOB GARFIELD: So does the Communications Decency Act need a do-over? It was passed, after all, in 1996 while the Internet was in its infancy. Privacy hawks say no. Kurt Opsahl is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

KURT OPSAHL: We as a society have taken a bet that it would be better to have a lot of different voices rather than have the law or the courts decide which voices can come forward.

Since 2001, the rule of thumb for government agencies responding to Freedom of Information Act requests has been "when in doubt, leave it out"...

A suit concerning those documents is just one of a slew filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seeking records pertaining to the lobbying surrounding last year's telecom surveillance immunity legislation, FBI databases, and White House policies governing electronic communications records. Several of those cases have been stayed pending the implementation of new FOIA guidelines.

I'm betting Michael DuBose, chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section, is a Steven Seagal fan...

Seth Schoen, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that these tools "do not necessarily require technical sophistication or indicate unusual expertise; they do not necessarily contribute to avoiding detecting; and they do not necessarily indicate premeditation or a commitment to a course of criminal conduct." He noted that he himself had authored a manual explaining how any ordinary computer user could make use of proxies to avoid Web filtering or censorship. He also urged the commission against conflating the sophistication of a tool itself—citing the anonymous and encrypted Tor routing system as an example—with the sophistication required to use it.

The Obama administration advised federal agencies Thursday to release their records and information to the public unless foreseeable harm would result...

An attorney in several pending lawsuits, David Sobel, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocate, was pleased by Holder's decision to review some existing cases and said it should open more records to public view.

"Both the president and the Attorney General have now articulated an extremely pro-disclosure policy for the federal government, and that is a very positive development," Sobel said. "If there is really a new presumption in favor of disclosure, one would expect to see the outright reversal of many Bush-era decisions to withhold information."

The Department of Justice is urging courts to allow law enforcement officials to obtain users' cell tower location data without a search warrant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are objecting, and the courts have so far held that location information stored by a mobile phone provider is legally protected by the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The iPhone Dev-Team (not the Cupertino version) hasn't wasted anytime in declaring the iPhone 3.0 operating system "jailbreakable"...

However, keep in mind that despite the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts, jailbreaking the iPhone is still illegal.

Oral arguments will soon be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the highly watched dispute between renowned jeweler Tiffany & Co. and eBay, the popular online auction site, over who bears the burden of "policing" online counterfeit activity...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reaches even further, arguing that Inwood is entirely inapplicable because eBay does not possess or access the goods and lacks the ability to discern infringements.

The Obama administration says the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers...

The latest surveillance case is believed to be the only one of its kind to reach the federal appellate level, said Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Almost everybody in the United States carries or will carry a cell phone," she said. "This tracking ability is a means where the government can find out the location of pretty much everybody without much effort or expense."

How does a tech company spell suicide in 2009? D-R-M...

More troubling is a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that suggests Apple may be embracing the authentication model after it pushed other industries to abandon copy protection.

Want to know what the feds have been up to? Anyone with Internet access can now search through thousands of once-classified documents that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has "has pried loose from secretive government agencies" through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Monday, the EFF announced a new search engine specifically designed for these documents.

Last week, Google introduced its new "interest based" ads, which is based on tracking your browsing activity and targeting ads based on that behavior. Fortunately, there are several ways to opt out.

There are obvious privacy issues that pop up when a company tracks your web history; it's also annoying and creepy. Fortunately, Google has implemented targeted ads in a relatively benign way, working with privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to make avoiding these ads pretty easy. As EFF points out, the best way to do this would be to require users to opt in to targeted ads, rather than opt out.

nformation may want to be free, but sometimes information collected on the public’s behalf needs some help making its way out of the government labyrinth and into the daylight...

Meanwhile, on the tech front, the Electronic Frontier Foundation marked Sunshine Week by launching a new search tool to let the public paw through the thousands of pages of government documents it has extracted over the years through FOIA requests.

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), part of President Barack Obama's office, has denied a company's request for information about a secretive anticounterfeiting trade agreement being negotiated, citing national security concerns...

Two digital rights groups, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have a pending lawsuit against USTR for its denial of their requests for information on the trade pact. That lawsuit, dating back to the administration of former President George Bush, has been stayed until June 30 as both sides wait on FOIA guidance from new U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights...

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

A law requiring US citizens to present federally mandated ID cards for "official purposes" such as boarding a plane is likely to be shaken down at the door under the US Department of Homeland Security's new secretary, Janet Napolitano...

Privacy advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claim the Real ID law fails to provide critical privacy-security safeguards for personal data.

Yes, and there are lots of ways they can do it. Web pages are a flexible platform for exchanging information, but that also means it can be easy to track what you’re looking at on them. The first method is through third-party content. Say Company A is an advertising or tracking firm. When you visit sites that display A’s ads or use A to track their visitors, A can identify your browser and see what pages you visit on those sites (and more). To learn how to mitigate these tactics, go to ssd.eff.org/cookies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation last week took the wraps off a new Web site that is designed to help you keep the government from taking the wraps off your personal communications and stored data.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is supposed to balance the rights of copyright holders and online authors, while protecting Internet service providers from getting caught in the crossfire. But Google's policy for handling DMCA notices seems to leave bloggers with scant hope of getting improperly removed content restored...

According to Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this presents an "unsettled question" for both bloggers and providers. "Many countries, including the UK, have a 'making available' right for copyright owners," says von Lohmann. "As a result, those copyright owners frequently argue that anything that can be accessed in their country violates their rights. I think that's wrong—the making available right is territorial, just like every other copyright interest, and so it only applies if someone is making the work available in the UK (i.e., the server is in the UK). But I don't think any courts have definitively ruled on this issue."

A heartfelt thank you from liberty central to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for its Surveillance Self-Defence website, which aims to educate the public about "the law and technology of government surveillance ... [as well as] providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it."

Craigslist, the online classifieds juggernaut, has run afoul of authorities once again, over the ads in its adult section. On Thursday, the sheriff in Cook County, Ill., called the site the “largest source of prostitution in America,” and filed a civil lawsuit to get Craigslist’s “erotic services” section shut down...

Does the sheriff’s suit have a legal leg to stand on? Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman doesn’t think so. “I would be surprised if it went very far,” he said today. Aside from Craigslist already cooperating with authorities, a federal court has already ruled that Web sites are immune to liability for what a third party posts, so long as the site doesn’t directly help create that content. And if it ever got that far, constitutional freedom of speech protections likely also apply to Craiglist, he said.

Back in January, we noted that the EFF had scored another hit in its ongoing patent-busting project, getting the USPTO to re-examine a patent held by Seer Systems. It appears that Seer Systems doesn't much like being targeted by the EFF and decided to threaten the group with a defamation lawsuit over how it described Seer's actions.

“The Kindle Swindle?,” by Roy Blount Jr. (Op-Ed, Feb. 25), missed the heart of the matter.

As we explained in the blog post to which Mr. Blount referred, there is no legal basis for the claim that authors are owed royalties for the Kindle’s “read to me” feature.

In the five years since he co-founded RateMDs.com, a site where patients rate their doctors, John Swapceinski has been threatened with lawsuits at least once a week. Not one disgruntled physician has actually carried out his threats, Swapceinski tells MediaPost...

Certainly digital rights advocates are chomping at the bit to take on Medical Justice in court. When asked about the prospect of a review site defending a copyright infringement lawsuit for posting a patient review, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Matt Zimmerman had this to say: "I want that case."

You say you have no secrets. Your life's an open book. You have nothing to hide. But still, do you really want to make it easy for Uncle Sam -- or anyone else for that matter -- to rifle through your contact lists, read your e-mails or monitor your cash flow?...

"We all benefit from the explosion in communications technology, but it also means that there are new and growing caches of sensitive data about us," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that, this week, launched a surveillance self-defense campaign.

Google is promising that its new location-reporting service Latitude, which lets you broadcast where you are to your friends, will have a memory leak and won't remember anything...

The policy, created in consultation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts Latitude on equal privacy footing with Loopt, a popular friend-finding service that predates Latitude. Both services now overwrite your previous location with your new location, and don't keep logs.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has accused RealNetworks of destroying evidence relevant to a lawsuit over the company's DVD-copying software...

In a letter sent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in October, the MPAA said that groups who defend companies like Real are living in the past, and that P2P is out while legit video options are totally in.

As the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, AT&T has had a lot to celebrate. Rivals hope to crash the party...

"[The issue arose] in large part because of the iPhone, because the iPhone did not exist in 2006," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior intellectual property attorney, Fred von Lohmann.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has opened a web site designed to help you keep the government from get its grubby mitts on your hard-drive today.

Should the government be able to surreptitiously install GPS tracking devices on your vehicle without a warrant? The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation argued this week that such activity is a violation of civil liberties.

The White House and YouTube have not parted ways, despite claims to the contrary...

Among those calling for greater privacy protections at the White House site, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) expressed cautious optimism that the White House Web team was responding to privacy concerns, even if it appeared reluctant to acknowledge its response.

A White House decision to use a generic flash video player for hosting President Barack Obama's latest weekly video address on WhiteHouse.gov is being seen by some as a sign that the executive office is responding to previous concerns about the use of embedded YouTube videos on the site...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy rights group, in January sent a letter to White House Counsel Gregory Craig about the issue. Yesterday, it expressed hope that the latest change shows that the White House is listening to the concerns.

Police should be required to get a search warrant before placing GPS tracking devices on vehicles belonging to criminal suspects, privacy and civil liberties groups argued in court papers Tuesday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the D.C. chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief in the federal appeals court in Washington on behalf of Antoine Jones of Waldorf, Md.

Responding to complaints by privacy activists, the White House has quietly abandoned YouTube as the provider of the embedded videos on the president's official home page...

The White House's decision to embed YouTube videos in the president's official home page drew instant criticism from privacy activists. In addition to several critical posts on my blog, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Center for Digital Democracy blasted the choice of video providers.

At the end of January, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation complained to the Obama administration about its practice of embedding YouTube clips on the site WhiteHouse.gov. The EFF argued that YouTube poses a potential threat to users' privacy because it places persistent cookies on users' computers, including hard-to-delete flash cookies.

Recently I spoke at the BIL conference in Long Beach, Calif. One of the other presenters was Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation...

At BIL '09, Brad gave a presentation entitled "The Evils of Cloud Computing: Data Portability and Single Sign On." I wanted to give Brad the opportunity to discuss the problems he sees and propose solutions to the cloud computing community, so I asked him a few questions. This way we won't speculate or judge what Brad means when he calls cloud computing "evil."

How can we, the people, decide if there is too much or too little telecommunications surveillance in the United States? How can we know if law enforcement is using its surveillance capacities in the most effective fashion?...

This particular issue is now before a U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California in pathbreaking litigation led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.