EFF Wins Court Ruling Upholding Invalidation of Bad Patent That Threatened Podcasters
San Francisco, California—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won a court ruling today affirming that an infamous podcasting patent used by a patent troll to threaten podcasters big and small was properly held invalid by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
A unanimous decision by a three-judge...
E-commerce RCEP Chapter: Have Big Tech’s Demands Fizzled?
Post-Mortem of Asia-Pacific regional IGF Panel Discussing Trade Rules
Over the past month, trade officials of the ASEAN group of countries and its six biggest trading partners have been frantically working to finalize the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Expected to be ratified later this year, the RCEP is...
Internet Censorship Bill Would Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation
There’s a new bill in Congress that would threaten your right to free expression online. If that weren’t enough, it could also put small Internet businesses in danger of catastrophic litigation.
Don’t let its name fool you: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) wouldn’t help...
Deciphering China’s VPN Ban
This weekend Apple took a dispiriting step in the policing of its Chinese mainland App store: the company removed several Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications that allowed users to circumvent the China’s extensive internet censorship apparatus. In effect, the company has once again aided the Chinese government in...
EFF Continues Fighting For Public Access To Patent Litigation
Did one Stupid Patent of the Month winner enforce its patent in an exceptional manner, so much so that it has to pay defendants’ attorneys’ fees? That is a question a court in the Eastern District of Texas is being asked to decide, with a public hearing on the...
Require Police to Purge Their Databases of Innocent Citizens’ Personal Information, EFF Tells Virginia Supreme Court
License plates are more than numbers and letters you display on your car. When police photograph your license plate, scan it, record the precise times and locations of the scans, and store all that information indefinitely in a database, they can search this information to piece together your movements and...
Bassel Khartabil, In Memoriam
Bassel Khartabil, the Syrian open source developer, blogger, entrepreneur, hackerspace founder, and free culture advocate, has been executed by the Syrian authorities. Noura Ghazi Safadi, his wife, received confirmation of her husband's death by the Assad-led Syrian government yesterday. The execution took place in secret in November 2015. It...
Misused Espionage Act Targets Government Whistleblowers
This week we celebrated National Whistleblower Appreciation Day—an appropriate time to speak out against the U.S. government’s continued use of the Espionage Act to prosecute government leakers, and in so doing, restrict the flow of important information to the press.
As we wrote on the 100th anniversary of the Act’s...
Stupid Patent of the Month: HP Patents Reminder Messages
On July 25, 2017, the Patent Office issued a patent to HP on reminder messages. Someone needs to remind the Patent Office to look at the real world before issuing patents.
United States Patent No. 9,715,680 (the ’680 patent) is titled “Reminder messages.” While the patent application...
EFF Supports Senate Email and Location Privacy Bill
Congress Must Enact ECPA Reform Legislation This Year
EFF applauds Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) for today introducing the ECPA Modernization Act of 2017 to protect user privacy in cloud content and geolocation information. As part of a congressional effort to reform the ...
