After decades of increasingly draconian statutes and judicial decisions, our copyright system has veered far away from its original purpose. To help get copyright back on track, EFF is joining forces with a variety of groups—including libraries, industry associations, and public interest advocates—to launch a new coalition focused on promoting...

Suppose you get sued by a patent troll. You then learn that the troll has been sitting on its patent for years without giving you any warning. If you’d known about the risk, you might have been able to design your product differently to avoid infringement. Even worse, when you...

EFF recently updated our SSL certificate and configuration. This gave us an A+ rating on SSL Labs, a great jumping off point for reviewing a site's secure connection. What follows is a quick, technical guide to how we achieved this.
Generating a Certificate
First we generate an...

Journalists and transparency activists across the country have done a phenomenal job of shining light on how local law enforcement agencies use emerging technologies to surveil everyday people on a massive scale. It’s often like playing Whac-A-Mole and Go Fish...

Last year, the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court, issued a landmark decision in Commonwealth v. Augustine, requiring police in the state to get a search warrant before they can track individuals’ past movements using information from their cell phones. It was a significant victory for...

When your elected representatives are in their home-districts, it’s a chance for you to hear—in person—what they have to say about surveillance. Even while in session, Congress takes recesses. The House majority leader schedule and the Senate calendar can help you figure out when those recesses are taking...

EFF recently won our challenge to invalidate claims of the “podcasting patent” using a procedure at the Patent Office called inter partes review. This procedure allowed us to challenge a patent that was being used to demand licenses from individual podcasters, even though EFF itself had never been...

Sen. Ron Wyden took to Wired yesterday to argue that the Fast Track bill he co-sponsored to rush approval for trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement will help protect the free and open Internet. Sen. Wyden has long been a staunch defender of the Internet and...

The notice and takedown provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provide a streamlined way for copyright owners to remove material from the Internet. Now almost two decades after the law was passed, the DMCA takedown system has proved itself to be an utter disappointment. Users are...