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FEATURED UPDATE
Today the Supreme Court issued a decision that will have a massive impact on patent troll litigation. In TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods , the court ruled that patent owners can sue corporate defendants only in districts where the defendant is incorporated or has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business. This means that patent trolls can no longer drag companies to distant and inconvenient forums that favor patent owners but have little connection...
FEATURED UPDATE
We're finally going to get some honesty on how the NSA spies on innocent Americans' communications. A federal judge late last week in Jewel v. NSA , EFF’s landmark case against mass surveillance, ordered [PDF] the government to provide to it all relevant evidence necessary to prove or deny that plaintiffs were subject to NSA surveillance via tapping into the Internet backbone. This includes surveillance done pursuant to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act since 2008, which is up...
FEATURED UPDATE
Pretty much everyone says they are in favor of net neutrality–the idea that service providers shouldn’t engage in data discrimination, but should instead remain neutral in how they treat the content that flows over their networks. But actions speak louder than words, and today’s action by the FCC speaks volumes. After weeks of hand-waving and an aggressive misinformation campaign by major telecom companies, the FCC has taken the first concrete step toward dismantling the net neutrality protections it adopted two...
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Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data On Your Devices and In the Cloud
How to Opt Out of Twitter's New Privacy Settings
Since Wednesday night, Twitter users have been greeted by a pop-up notice about Twitter’s new privacy policy , which will come into effect June 18: Contrary to the inviting “Sounds good” button to accept the...
The Latest
A Bad Broadband Market Begs for Net Neutrality Protections
Anyone who has spent hours on the phone with their cable company can tell you that in the broadband market, the customer is not always right. When it comes to Internet access wired into your home, the major ISPs like Comcast, Charter, and Verizon don’t have to play nice because...
Diego Gomez Finally Cleared of Criminal Charges for Sharing Research
In 2011, Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the Internet. After a long legal battle, Diego was able to breathe a sigh of relief today as he was cleared of the criminal charges that he faced for this harmless act of...
Book Review: The End of Ownership
In the digital age, a lot depends on whether we actually own our stuff, and who gets to decide that in the first place. In The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Age , Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz walk us through a detailed and...
Congress’ Imperfect Start to Addressing Vulnerabilities
With the global and debilitating WannaCry ransomware attack dominating the news in recent weeks, it’s increasingly necessary to have a serious policy debate about disclosure and patching of vulnerabilities in hardware and software. Although WannaCry takes advantage of a complex and collective failure in protecting key computer...
TPP Comes Back From the Dead... Or Does It?
Could the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) be coming back from the dead? It is at least a possibility, following the release of a carefully-worded statement last Sunday from an APEC Ministerial meeting in Vietnam. The statement records the agreement of the eleven remaining partners of the TPP,...
No Evidence that "Stronger" Patents Will Mean More Innovation
Push to once again allow abstract patents is misguided Right now, the patent lobby—in the form of the Intellectual Property Owners Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association —is demanding “stronger” patent laws. They want to undo Alice v. CLS Bank and...
Wikimedia's Constitutional Challenges of NSA Upstream Surveillance Move Forward
A court ruling today allowing Wikimedia ’s claims challenging the constitutionality of NSA’s Upstream surveillance to go forward is good news. It shows that the court—the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—is willing to take seriously the impact mass surveillance...
Addressing Delays in Democracy.io and the EFF Action Center Message Delivery
EFF has identified and addressed the delivery problem, and we extend our deep apologies for the delays to digital activists who use our tools. We recently became aware that there were significant delays in delivering some of the messages sent to Congress via two of EFF’s open-source messaging tools,...
Court Orders Government To Provide More Information About Withheld Information in Laura Poitras’ FOIA Lawsuit
Laura Poitras —the Academy and Pulitzer Prize Award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist behind CITIZENFOUR and Risk —wants to know why she was stopped and detained at the U.S. border every time she entered the country between July 2006 and June 2012. EFF is representing Poitras in...
Judge Orders Government to Provide Evidence About Internet Surveillance
We're finally going to get some honesty on how the NSA spies on innocent Americans' communications. A federal judge late last week in Jewel v. NSA , EFF’s landmark case against mass surveillance, ordered [PDF] the government to provide to it all relevant evidence necessary to prove...
