At the height of the first dot-com bubble, many patent applications were filed that took common ideas and put them on the Internet. This month’s stupid patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,738,155 (“the ’155 patent”), is a good example of that trend.
The patent is titled...

The Patent Office doesn’t always do the best job. That’s how Personal Audio managed to get a patent on podcasting, even though other people were podcasting years before Personal Audio first applied for a patent. As we’ve detailed on many occasions, patents are often granted on things that...

Another court has ruled that the public still has the ability to play old music that almost everyone believed they lawfully had the ability to play. The Florida Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of New York State’s high court, ruled yesterday that its state law, which governs sound...

Freedom of speech “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all.”- United States v. Associated Press, 52 F....

The public should be able to read and use the scientific research we paid for. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, or FASTR (S. 1701, H.R. 3427). Despite broad bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle, FASTR has been...

UPDATE: Tune in to the livestream here!
Do you want to know what it’s like to be an open-source developer? Want to see how we work on Certbot behind the scenes?
This Halloween, an EFF Certbot developer will be live-streaming their work on Twitch to show...

Many groups in the Electronic Frontier Alliance work to ensure that their neighbors have the tools they need to maintain control of their information. Others devote their efforts to community organizing or advocacy, assuring that authorities respect the civil and privacy rights of people in their community. For over...

As we detailed yesterday, a bill introduced this week by Sens. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul would represent the most comprehensive reform so far of Section 702, the law that authorizes the government to engage in mass warrantless surveillance of the Internet. EFF supports the bill, known as the...

It's been just over a year since HP got caught using dirty tricks to force its customers to use its official, high-priced ink, and now it's Epson's turn to get in on the act.
Epson claims that ink-cartridges that are compatible with its printers violate a nonspecific patent...