Building the “Great Collective Organism of the Mind” at The John Perry Barlow Symposium
Individuals from the furthest corners of cyberspace gathered Saturday to celebrate EFF co-founder, John Perry Barlow, and discuss his ideas, life, and leadership.The John Perry Barlow Symposium, graciously hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco, brought together a collection of Barlow’s favorite thinkers and friends to discuss his ideas...
D.C. Court: Accessing Public Information is Not a Computer Crime
Good news for anyone who uses the Internet as a source of information: A district court in Washington, D.C. has ruled that using automated tools to access publicly available information on the open web is not a computer crime—even when a website bans automated access in its terms of...
New Hampshire Court: First Amendment Protects Criticism of “Patent Troll”
A New Hampshire state court has dismissed a defamation suit filed by a patent owner unhappy that it had been called a “patent troll.” The court ruled [PDF] that the phrase “patent troll” and other rhetorical characterizations are not the type of factual statements that can be the basis...
Day of Action: Help California Pass a Gold Standard Net Neutrality Bill
In December of 2017, contrary to the will of millions of Americans, the FCC made the decision to abandon net neutrality protections. On the first day of business in the California state legislature, State Sen. Scott Wiener introduced a bill that would bring back those protections and...
No, Section 230 Does Not Require Platforms to Be “Neutral”
One jaw-dropping moment during the Senate’s hearing on Tuesday came when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Unsatisfied by Zuckerberg’s response that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas,” Sen. Cruz continued, “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing...
User Privacy Isn't Solely a Facebook Issue
During Congressional hearings about Facebook’s data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Mark Zuckerberg drew an important distinction between what we expect from our Internet service providers (ISPs, such as Comcast or Verizon) as opposed to platforms like Facebook that operate over the Internet.Put simply, an ISP...
Despite What Zuckerberg’s Testimony May Imply, AI Cannot Save Us
Yesterday and today, Mark Zuckerberg finally testified before the Senate and House, facing Congress for the first time to discuss data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As we predicted, Congress didn’t stick to Cambridge Analytica. Congress also grilled Zuckerberg on content moderation—i.e., ...
Facebook, This Is Not What “Complete User Control” Looks Like
If you watched even a bit of Mark Zuckerberg’s ten hours of congressional testimony over the past two days, then you probably heard him proudly explain how users have “complete control” via “inline” privacy controls over everything they share on the platform. Zuckerberg’s language here misses the critical distinction between...
Solutions for a Stalled NAFTA: Stop Pushing So Hard on IP, and Release the Text
The deadline for concluding a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), originally scheduled for last year, has continued to slip. An eighth and final formal round of negotiations was cancelled last week, and despite earlier optimistic plans that the parties could announce an "agreement in principle" at...










