Disability, Education, Repair and Health: How Mexico's Copyright Law Hurts Self-Determination in the Internet Age
Mexico's new copyright law was rushed through Congress without adequate debate or consultation, and that's a problem, because the law -- a wholesale copy of the US copyright system -- creates unique risks to the human rights of the Mexican people, and the commercial fortunes of Mexican businesses and...
Turkey's New Internet Law Is the Worst Version of Germany's NetzDG Yet
Update: This post has been corrected as of August 1, 2020 to accurately reflect the details of the NetzDG.For years, free speech and press freedoms have been under attack in Turkey. The country has the distinction of being the world’s largest jailer of journalists and has in recent...
Self-Described Twitter Troll Ryan Hintze Discovers New Way to Troll Twitter: the DMCA
Let’s start by making one thing clear: you don’t own an article that is written about you, and if you do file a frivolous copyright claim about that article, you certainly don’t have a right to DMCA a tweet about that DMCA takedown.As Luke O’Neil first reported in 2018,...
Court Denies EFF, ACLU Effort to Unseal Ruling Rejecting DOJ Effort to Break Encryption
A federal appeals court last week refused to unseal a court order that reportedly stopped the Justice Department from forcing Facebook to break the encryption it offers to users of its Messenger application.The unpublished decision ends an effort by EFF, ACLU, and Stanford cybersecurity scholar Riana Pfefferkorn to...
Why EFF Doesn’t Support California Proposition 24
This November, Californians will be called upon to vote on a ballot initiative called the California Privacy Rights Act, or Proposition 24. EFF does not support it; nor does EFF oppose it.EFF works across the country to enact and defend laws that empower technology users to...
When the U.S. Patent Office Won’t Do Its Job, Congress Should Step In
When people get sued by patent trolls, they can fight back in one of two places: a U.S. district court or the Patent and Trademark Office. But the Patent Office is putting its thumb on the scale again in favor of patent owners and against technology users. This time, the...
Mexico's New Copyright Law: Cybersecurity and Human Rights
This month, Mexico rushed through a new, expansive copyright law without adequate debate or consultation, and as a result, it adopted a national rule that is absolutely unfit for purpose, with grave implications for human rights and cybersecurity.The new law was passed as part of the country's obligations under...
A Legislative Path to an Interoperable Internet
It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone lines provided interoperable communication...
California Legislator Introduces Anti-Rural Fiber Legislation That Prioritizes DSL
Frontier’s bankruptcy has serious consequences for Americans, including 2 million Californians, who are stuck with their deteriorating DSL monopoly. After deciding for years to never upgrade their networks to fiber—despite the fact that, according to their own bankruptcy filing, they could have profitably upgraded 3 million customers to...
How Mexico's New Copyright Law Crushes Free Expression
When Mexico's Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump's United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights.The result is a legal regime that has all...
