We’ve long been concerned about “patent trolls”—companies that don’t produce anything themselves but buy patents, then make their money by threatening and even suing companies that are producing products. But today we’re going to discuss a different kind of trolling: running fishing lures through the water. That’s because...

This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be...

We all know justice is blind. But that is supposed to mean that everyone before it is treated equally, not that the justice system must close its eyes and refuse to look at important legal issues facing Americans. Yet the government continues to convince courts that they cannot consider the...

One of the biggest reasons the Eastern District of Texas hears so many patent cases (at last check, almost half of all cases filed this year were filed in the Eastern District) is because of a Federal Circuit case from 1990—VE Holding—that radically expanded the places patent owners...

EFF is pleased to welcome Elliot Harmon to its activism team. Elliot will be focusing on patent law and intellectual property issues. He's interested in ways that IP law can accelerate innovation rather than hinder it. He jumped right in promoting Open Access Week in October.

Before...

On September 17, 2015, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a $33 million settlement between Comcast, CPUC staff, and the California Attorney General’s office (along with public interest groups TURN and the Greenlining Institute), related to a Comcast data breach that resulted in the personal information (name, address and...

Yesterday an Australian court found Google liable for defaming someone simply by returning a search result about her. The plaintiff in that case, Janice Duffy, complained that a search for her name returned links to unfavorable articles on the Ripoff Report website, as well as prompting unfavorable autocomplete suggestions...

Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected.
Case in point: automated license plate recognition (ALPR)...