The 2015 version of the USA Freedom Act, HR 2048/S.1123 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee this week, with a vote of 25 ayes and 2 noes. The Committee did not pass any amendments to the legislation. But the markup discussion revealed a lot about where...
Two men are going to fight this weekend, and HBO and Showtime have already thrown the first punch in the legal fight over online streaming of the match. Taking advantage of an increasingly abused loophole in copyright law, they have just won a court order requiring a host of...
The New Orleans Advocate recently published a shocking story that details the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases and familial DNA searching.In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was murdered in her apartment in a small town...
YouTube is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. We’re glad YouTube has managed to survive the copyright wars, when so many other services did not. We hope we even helped. So, congratulations YouTube, well done. Wouldn't fixing ContentID be a great way to celebrate it?
A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that...
Imagine you’re on your way to deliver a case of beer to a party. Before you get there, your boss sends you a text: They want 2 cases now. You read the text while driving (don’t do that), so you deliver an extra case when you arrive. Having successfully completed...
Deeplinks Blog by Jeremy Malcolm, Maira Sutton | April 30, 2015
The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has released its Special 301 Report for 2015 today, and true to form, it is another one-sided and harmful missive to the rest of the world that names and shames countries for not mirroring, or even exceeding, the United States’ restrictive copyright rules.
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São Paulo, Brazil's largest city and cultural center, hosted the second annual CryptoRave—a 24-hour long event where activists, organizations, and an eager audience collaborated to teach and learn about cyptography.
A bipartisan group of senators introduced the PATENT Act today—the latest reform bill to take on patent trolls. Authored by Sens. Grassley, Leahy, Cornyn, Schumer, Lee, Hatch, and Klobuchar, the "Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship Act of 2015" is an important step toward stopping abusive patent litigation.
The...
For years, with seemingly little to no oversight, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has been monitoring vast amounts of non-military U.S. Internet traffic and communications, looking for evidence of criminal activity. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit correctly held this “extraordinary” and illegal surveillance...
There may be nobody more committed to ensuring that the people have access to the law than rogue archivist, EFF client, and 2009 Pioneer Award winner Carl Malamud. This Friday, his latest campaign to free PACER culminates in a "polling place" at the Internet Archive in San Francisco,...
When we re-launched Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) last year to tackle the growing threat of online spying, we knew our greatest challenge was reaching everyone who urgently needed its advice. Technical knowledge about what to do, and what not to do, to protect your privacy online, is only truly useful...
The steamroller that is the copyright enforcement machine continues to trundle along around the world, flattening obstacles such as fair use, privacy and freedom of expression in its path. One of its latest stops has been in Australia, where that country’s copyright site-blocking laws, first seriously mooted last year,...
Aaron’s law, the proposed law named in honor of Internet hero Aaron Swartz was reintroduced last week by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Senator Wyden (D-Ore.), with new co-sponsor Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). This bill is the same as the one introduced in 2013 and we call upon...
Vehicle manufacturers like General Motors and John Deere are citing a particularly strange and onerous provision in copyright law to claim that you need permission to tinker with, repair, and innovate around your own car. According to them, you may own the parts, but you don’t own your copies of...
