Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities....

Finally, some good news from Congress this week. Patent and surveillance reform may be suffering setbacks, but open access may be recovering thanks to a new provision passed yesterday that mandates a solid public access policy for NASA, NSF, NIST, the National Weather Service, and the Office of Science of...

EFF and Public Knowledge have submitted comments to the Copyright Office, urging it to clarify the legality of using so-called "orphan works"—works that may or may not still be restricted by copyright, but for which the rightsholder is difficult or impossible to identify and locate. The orphan works...

Update (January 2016): There’s a new, expanded edition of Hacking the Patent System for 2016.
EFF is proud to participate in the launch of a new guide to alternative patent licensing. The guide was prepared by the Juelsgaard Intellectual Property & Innovation Clinic at Stanford Law...

In 2012, when Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis—as opposed to taking it down across the entire Twitter network—EFF defended that decision as the least terrible option. After all, when...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has put police on notice: an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) alert, without human verification, is not enough to pull someone over.
Last week, the appellate court issued an important opinion in Green v. City & County of San Francisco, a civil...

Patent reform suffered a massive setback today when Senator Patrick Leahy, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, announced that he is taking patent reform “off the agenda.” We understand that other senators—particularly Sens. Chuck Schumer and John Cornyn—were still working hard to reach a bipartisan deal. Just as they...