Cities across the country are switching to wireless smart meters. You may even have one in your home. Utility companies say the new technology helps consumers monitor their energy use and potentially save money. But smart meters also reveals intimate details about what’s going on inside the home. By collecting...

The U.S. government’s warrantless Internet spying is in the hot seat today.
The House Judiciary Committee is holding a two-part hearing this morning about the Section 702, created by the FISA Amendments Act, which the government uses to justify the unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans’ online activity. EFF...

Update: March 1, 2017 Today IBM told Ars Technica that it "has decided to dedicate the patent to the public" and it filed a formal disclaimer at the Patent Office making this dedication. While this is just one patent in IBM's massive portfolio, we are glad to...

EFF, Amnesty International, Color of Change, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and our other coalition partners are urging data brokers to take a stand against government surveillance and discrimination based on religion, national origin, and immigration status.
As explained in a joint statement released today, data brokers collect...

Talking about fair use often means talking about your right to re-use existing copyrighted works in the process of making something new - to make remixes and documentaries, parodies, or even to build novel Internet search tools. But now that copyright-protected software is in almost everything (including our cars, our...

Throughout human history, culture has been made by people telling one another stories, building on what has come before, and making it their own. Every generation, every storyteller puts their own spin on old tales to reflect their own values and changing times.
This creative remixing happens today and...

Next week the latest round of secret negotiations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) kicks off in Kobe, Japan. Once the shy younger sibling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the recent death of the TPP has thrust RCEP further into the spotlight, and raised the stakes both...

The idea that you don’t need a subject’s permission to report on them is fundamental to a free press. If a powerful or influential person, or company, could veto any coverage they don’t like, or make sure any embarrassing or incriminating statements disappear, there’d be little point to having a...

Dot-Org Registry Suspends Secretive Copyright-Policing Plan
Yesterday, the group that runs the .org top-level domain announced that they will suspend their plans to create a new, private, problematic copyright enforcement system. That’s welcome news for tens of millions of nonprofits, charities, businesses, clubs, bloggers, and personal website owners...