Stalemate Continues in Negotiations Over European Copyright Filters
This week is an important one in the ongoing negotiations over new copyright rules in Europe—which will have reverberations all over the world. As you may recall, the negotiations centre around two worrisome proposals being pushed by publisher and music industry lobby groups for inclusion in a new Digital...
Requiring Judicial Review for Every Gag Order Is a Simple Way to Have Our Backs: Apple Does but Google and Facebook Fall Short
As a civil liberties organization, it’s our job to evaluate how tech companies handle our most private data and to encourage them to do better year over year. Our Who Has Your Back report is designed to do both, which is one reason we revisit the report’s criteria every...
AT&T, Verizon, Other Telco Providers Lag Behind Tech Industry in Protecting Users from Government Overreach, EFF Annual Survey Shows
San Francisco, California—While many technology companies continue to step up their privacy game by adopting best practices to protect sensitive customer information when the government demands user data, telecommunications companies are failing to prioritize user privacy when the government comes knocking, an EFF annual survey shows. Even tech giants such...
New Research Estimates Value of Removing DRM Locks
Note: We’ve been in touch with a group of economists at the University of Glasgow who are investigating the market value on interoperability. Just in time for “Day Against DRM,” here are some of their initial conclusions.
My co-authors and I at the University of Glasgow are investigating how...
Third Circuit Declares First Amendment Right to Record Police
The First Amendment protects our right to use electronic devices to record on-duty police officers, according to a new ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Fields v. Philadelphia. This right extends to anyone with a recording device, journalists and members of the...
Court Orders Prolific Patent Troll Shipping & Transit LLC To Pay Defendant’s Legal Bill
Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as Arrivalstar, is one of the most prolific patent trolls ever. It has filed more than 500 lawsuits alleging patent infringement. Despite having filed so many cases, it has never had a court rule on the validity of its patents. In recent years,...
McMansion Hell Take-Down Controversy Illustrates Why the Supreme Court Should Clarify the Limits of the CFAA
When McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner received Zillow’s letter last month demanding that she take down her architecture parody blog, she was scared. So scared that she temporarily disabled access to her blog via McMansionHell.com until she could find an attorney. We’re happy she found us at EFF.
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Trump’s FBI Pick Has a Troubling History on Digital Liberties
President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Christopher Wray, will begin his confirmation process next week, giving lawmakers an opportunity to press him on his previous statements about expansive surveillance authorities and aggressive copyright prosecution.
Defense of the USA PATRIOT Act
During his tenure as Assistant...
Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web
Early today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body publicly announced its intention to publish Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—a DRM standard for web video—with no safeguards whatsoever for accessibility, security research or competition, despite an unprecedented internal controversy among its staff and members over this issue.
EME...
EFF Condemns Detentions at Turkish Digital Security Meeting
Turkish police officers in plainclothes yesterday raided a digital security training meeting on the island of Buyukuda in Istanbul, seizing equipment and detaining ten attendees, including Idil Eser, the director of Amnesty International Turkey. The human rights defenders are still being held in separate detention centers, and were...
