NASA's successful landing on Mars of an SUV-sized nuclear rover from a rocket-skycrane should have marked a high point in collaborative accomplishments between humans and robots. But here on Earth the situation was a bit more tense. That's because, just hours after the celebrated touchdown, Vice Magazine's Motherboard blog...

Last week, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in Flava Works v. myVidster, a case that raises questions about embedded videos and copyright infringement. Judge Richard Posner, who wrote the opinion, has a reputation for producing memorable and influential ruling, and this one is no exception....

EFF believes that it is vitally important that fair use and exceptions and limitations to copyright be protected in international trade agreements. But the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is putting Fair Use at risk with restrictive language in the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement (TPP). The US and...

Recently-released documents show that the FBI has been working since late 2011 with four states—Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and possibly Oregon—to ramp up the Next Generation Identification (NGI) Facial Recognition Program. When the program is fully deployed in 2014, the FBI expects its facial recognition database will...

Tajikistan Launches Online Censorship Body
Last week, the former Soviet nation of Tajikistan made headlines for having launched a program of Internet censorship. In fact, the country has been known to selectively block websites for political reasons for several years; this latest news actually involves the introduction...

The idea behind copyright is simple — it is supposed to be a balance in the service of the public interest. There's a trade-off: for accepting a restriction on certain speech, the public benefits from the production of more new creative works each year. That delicate equation is complicated by...