EFF Warns Another Court About the Dangers of Broad Site-Blocking Orders
A copyright holder can’t use a court order against the owner of an infringing website to conscript every intermediary service on the internet into helping make that website disappear, EFF and the Computer & Communications Industry Association argued in an amicus brief.The brief, filed in the U.S. District Court...
Copyright "Small Claims" Quasi-Court Opens. Here's Why Many Defendants Will Opt Out.
A new quasi-court for copyright, with nationwide reach, began accepting cases this week. The “Copyright Claims Board” or “CCB,” housed within the Copyright Office in Washington DC, will rule on private copyright infringement lawsuits from around the country and award damages of up to $30,000 per case. Though it’s...
Our Digital Lives Rest on a Robust, Flexible, and Stable Fair Use Regime
Much of what we do online involves reproducing copyrightable material, changing it, and/or making new works. Technically, pretty much every original tweet is copyrightable. And the vast majority of memes are based on copyrighted works. Your funny edits, mashups, and photoshopped jokes manipulate copyrighted works into new ones. Effective communication...
First Circuit Court of Appeals Upholds Eight Months of Warrantless 24/7 Video Surveillance
EFF Legal Intern Talya Nevins contributed to the drafting of this blog post.A federal appellate court in Massachusetts has issued a ruling that effectively allows federal agents in Puerto Rico and most of New England to secretly watch and videorecord all activity in front of anyone’s home 24 hours...
Facebook Says Apple is Too Powerful. They're Right.
In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...
Stop This California Bill that Bans Affordable Broadband Rules
Victory! New York’s Vaccine Privacy Bill Heads to Governor’s Desk
In a win for medical privacy in the Empire State, the New York Legislature has passed a pivotal bill that protects people’s private immunity information like COVID-19 vaccine status from being used to track their movements and be used against them in unauthorized ways. The Electronic Frontier Foundation ...
Senator Declares Amazon Ring's Audio Surveillance Capabilities "Threaten the Public"
Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, a long-time critic of Amazon’s surveillance doorbell camera, Ring, has released a letter of concern and inquiry concerning the device’s audio capabilities. This is partially in response to a recent study conducted by Consumer Reports that found that once the device’s motion sensor...
EFF Urges Congress to Strengthen the American Data Privacy and Protection Act
EFF has long been in the business of searching for ways to guarantee digital privacy. That made essential that, ahead of a hearing titled “Protecting America's Consumers: Bipartisan Legislation to Strengthen Data Privacy and Security,” we send a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the draft text...
How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data
Over the past few years, data brokers and federal military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies have formed a vast, secretive partnership to surveil the movements of millions of people. Many of the mobile apps on our cell phones track our movements with great precision and frequency. Data brokers harvest our...
