Today is the first day of Open Access Week. We’re joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations all week to discuss the importance of open access.
Open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to...

Since the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) was signed and its text released earlier this year, preventing the passage of that agreement through Congress during its upcoming lame duck session has become a top priority. But there's another secretive trade agreement lurking out of sight and out of mind,...

This post is part of the series “Unblinking Eyes: The State of Communications Surveillance in Latin America,” a collaborative project conducted with digital rights partners in Latin America, which documents and analyzes surveillance laws and practices in twelve countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,...

With a new school year underway, concerns about student privacy are at the forefront of parents’ and students’ minds. The Student Privacy Pledge, which recently topped 300 signatories and reached its two-year launch anniversary, is at the center of discussions about how to make sure tech and...

Before all of this ever went down
In another place, another town
You were just a face in the crowd
You were just a face in the crowd
Out in the street walking around
A face in the crowd

-Tom Petty
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Harvard researcher Yarden Katz has just published some fascinating findings on which universities have sold patents to notorious patent-holding company Intellectual Ventures (IV). Of the nearly 30,000 active patents that IV lists publicly, 470 of them were originally assigned to universities—a total of 61 institutions.
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When EFF launched a campaign last year to encourage the public to help us uncover police use of biometric technology, we weren’t sure what to expect. Within a few weeks, however, hundreds of people joined us in filing public records requests around the country.
Ultimately, dozens of...

It's Time for the Supreme Court to End the Venue Loophole
As we’ve detailed on many occasions, forum shopping is rampant in patent litigation. Last year, almost 45% of all patent cases were heard in the Eastern District of Texas, a sparsely populated region of Texas probably...