A European standards body is laying the ground for a sweeping mandate that mirrors and exceeds the US Broadcast Flag proposal. The European version of the Broadcast Flag promises to ban open source, compromise user freedom, and give entertainment companies a veto over the future of digital television technology.
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EFF returned to Geneva this week for the WIPO General Assembly, a two-week marathon meeting where last year's progress is reviewed and future plans are hatched laid. While there are dozens of items on the agenda, we're tracking two very closely: the future of WIPO's work vis-a-vis the developing world...

Memletics is one of those dime-a-dozen companies selling a product it promises will teach "accelerated learning" and how to "remember more." What makes Memletics remarkable is the digital rights management (DRM) scheme it uses on its books. The company's main product is a training manual that explains the "Memletics...

Imagine you're a happy-go-lucky conglomerate of Hollywood media companies.
Faced with some tweaks to your business model that you'd rather not
contemplate, your members have conceived of an ingenious alternative:
compelling tech companies to implement shoddy copy-protection on every digital
AV-enabled computer in the land.

Let's...

Reporters Without Borders has published an outstanding how-to guide for bloggers and "cyberdissidents" seeking to make their voices heard in the face of government monitoring, censorship, and worse. Reads the introduction:

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure....

WIPO's "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations" [PDF] is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.
If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters copyright-like control over the content of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright in what...

It's no surprise that the National Security Agency (NSA) is working on technologies that can locate you in geographical space by analyzing your Internet communications. What is somewhat odd is that the government agency is patenting them. Just a few days ago, the NSA was granted a patent on...