YouTube User Fights Unfair Takedown Campaign from UFC
San Francisco – The creator of popular post-fight commentary videos on YouTube is demanding an end to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)’s unfair practice of sending takedown notices based on bogus copyright claims. The creator, John MacKay, is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).MacKay operates the “Boxing Now”...
Courts to Government Officials: Stop Censoring on Social Media.
The Internet, and social media in particular, is uniquely designed to promote free expression, so much so that the Supreme Court has recognized social media as the “most important places” for speech and sharing viewpoints. Like most of us. government agencies and officials have created social media profiles and...
Don’t Let California’s Legislature Extend Broadband Monopolies for Comcast and AT&T
Californians have successfully pushed the state's legislature to restore two-thirds of the 2015 Open Internet Order through state laws. Stopping legislation from Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez that's backed by AT&T and Comcast is the final piece to bringing back those critical protections to promote broadband choice. The California Assembly will soon...
Why Outlawing Cryptocurrency Purchases is a Terrible Idea
A member of the U.S. House of Representatives last week called for a bill outlawing Americans from making cryptocurrency purchases, aligning with anti-cryptocurrency policies and approaches in countries such as Iran and Egypt. There is no language for this potential bill or any explanation of whether such...
Social Media Councils: A Better Way Forward, Window Dressing, or Global Speech Police?
Social media platforms routinely make arbitrary and contradictory decisions about what speech to block or penalize. No one is happy with the status quo: not people who want more censorship, nor people who want less censorship, nor people who simply want platforms to make different choices so that already-marginalized groups...
EFF Supports Unnamed Company in Bringing an End to Endless NSL Gag Orders
EFF and ACLU filed an amicus brief last week in a case that may finally force the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to resolve one of the most serious problems with National Security Letters: NSL gag orders that have no fixed end date. Similar to subpoenas, NSLs are...
Consumer Data Privacy Advocates to Senate Committee: Here's How to Protect Consumers
Last week, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation held a hearing on Consumer Perspectives: Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework. Unlike previous hearings this year that only featured tech industry panelists, this hearing featured a panel of consumer privacy advocates, including:Helen Dixon,...
Court Refuses to Keep Patent Licensor's Secrets
Patent owners shouldn’t be allowed to keep basic facts about their patents secret—especially when they initiate litigation in courts, which are presumptively open to the public. Uniloc is one of the worst examples of such a company: it doesn’t make any products, but sues lots of others that do. Then,...
Coin Center’s Report Explores Privacy Coins, Decentralized Exchanges, and the First Amendment
Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh published a report exploring the potential Constitutional concerns should aggressive regulators attempt to crack down on the coders developing ideas for cryptocurrencies and decentralized exchanges.For long-time readers of the EFF blog, some of these ideas will seem familiar. EFF has been asserting that publishing code...
Shareholders Demand To Know How Northrop Grumman Will Protect Human Rights While Building Massive DHS Database
Over the next few years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to implement an enormous biometric collection program which will endanger the rights of citizens and foreigners alike. The agency intends to collect at least seven types of biometric identifiers, including face and voice data, DNA, scars, and tattoos,...









