"Secrecy in government is fundamentally anti-democratic...Open debate and discussion of public issues are vital to our national health. On public questions there should be 'uninhibited, robust, and wide-open' debate." —New York Times Co. v. U.S., 403 U.S. 713, 724 (1971) (Douglas, J., concurring).
Last week, cloud storage provider Dropbox...

Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims. When software security company Kaspersky Lab refused to surrender, Lodsys settled for nothing (yes, you read that right—absolutely nothing) rather than take its claims to trial.
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On Monday, the W3C announced that its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, had determined that the "playback of protected content" was in scope for the W3C HTML Working Group's new charter, overriding EFF's formal objection against its inclusion. This means the controversial Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue...

It's no secret that the copyright lobby exerts an undue influence in shaping Internet policy. But the mechanisms by which that happens—which can include not just the legislative bodies of dozens of countries, but also backroom, off the record dealings—can be confusing and opaque, even to people following it closely.
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The competition is fierce, but Lodsys might be the worst patent troll in America. Using vaguely worded early-90s patents that barely rise above gibberish, it has waged a massive campaign of lawsuits and intimidation against small application developers. Last week saw two big stories in the ongoing Lodsys saga.
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In the latest salvo in the battle to defend the right to publish the law, EFF filed a counterclaim on Friday against three standards development organizations (“SDOs”), asking a federal court in Washington to declare that the online publication of safety codes does not violate...

Imagine a conversation in the kitchen --
"Patrick did you eat the pie I left on the counter this morning?"

"Mom, I did not eat it for breakfast."
"That's not what I asked. Did you eat it anytime?"
"Any other information is in...

A federal judge ordered the government to unseal more documents concerning the NSA spying programs by December 20, 2013. The judge issued the ruling in EFF's lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, which began in 2008 over the NSA spying program initiated by the Bush Administration, which continues to this day.
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