The ebb and flow of gas and electricity into your home contains surprisingly detailed information about your daily life. Energy usage data, measured moment by moment, allows the reconstruction of a household's activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when...

The Obama Administration has been slowly ramping up its attention to intellectual property issues. Over the past few months, we've seen an IP "summit" at the White House. We've seen the successful nomination of a new cabinet-level "IP Czar" position. We've seen the announcement of a new DOJ task force...

We often criticize DMCA takedown abuse here at EFF, but last week's Cryptome snafu highlights another facet of the problem: how a DMCA takedown for one item can result in the removal of lots of lawful material.
To recap, Cryptome posted Microsoft’s global criminal compliance manual....

As we've pointed out repeatedly, poor design decisions in YouTube's "Content ID" system have resulted in over-blocking of videos that remix copyrighted materials. Today we got perhaps the most vivid example of the problem: the "silencing" of a lecture by Prof. Larry Lessig about the...

Yesterday, Microsoft used a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice to demand that a copy of the "Microsoft® Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook" (the Compliance Manual) be removed from Cryptome, a security website. As a result, Network Solutions felt obliged to takedown the entire Cryptome.org domain,...

Update: YouTube responded to the letter from EFF and the National Coalition Against Censorship by doing just what we asked. They state: "We have re-reviewed your videos and have reinstated them with an age gate." This is good news, and YouTube is to be commended for correcting its error. Amy...

Let's say you are a blogger who writes about music regularly and includes links to music in your posts. How do you avoid having your blog censored off the Internet by "DMCA takedown notices" sent out by music industry lawyers (as happened last week to several blogs hosted by...