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For tech lawyers, one of the hottest questions this year is: can companies use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—an imprecise and outdated criminal anti-“hacking” statute intended to target computer break-ins—to block their competitors from accessing publicly available information on their websites? The answer to this question has wide-ranging implications for everyone: it could impact the public’s ability to meaningfully access publicly available information on the open web. This will impede investigative journalism and research. And in a world...
When the FCC’s “Restoring Internet Freedom Order,” which repealed net neutrality protections the FCC had previously issued, was published on February 22nd , it was interpreted by many to mean it would go into effect on April 23. That’s not true, and we still don’t know when the previous net neutrality protections will end. On the Federal Register’s website —which is the official daily journal of the United States Federal Government and publishes all proposed and adopted rules, the so-called...
We filed an amicus brief in a federal appellate case called United States v. Ackerman Friday, arguing something most of us already thought was a given—that the Fourth Amendment protects the contents of your emails from warrantless government searches. Email and other electronic communications can contain highly personal, intimate details of our lives. As one court noted , through emails, “[l]overs exchange sweet nothings, and businessmen swap ambitious plans, all with the click of a mouse button.” In an age...
The Catalog of Missing Devices
There’s a whole catalog of devices that are missing from our world. Things we’d pay money for — things you could earn money with — don’t exist thanks to the chilling effects of an obscure copyright law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201).