In a hearing last week in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder announced his support for updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). ECPA, which was written in 1986, is the main privacy law protecting private electronic messages like email, private Facebook messages,...

Once again, we are seeing entrenched interests try to fight the future with scare tactics and misinformation. This time, it's major journal publishers, and their target is open access to taxpayer-funded research.
First things first: The reason the publishers are on the warpath is that state and federal...

The patent troll problem is not new. Trolls have been targeting companies large and small for some time, dragging productive businesses into court and extorting licensing fees that have become a nearly unavoidable tax on innovation. This is wrong.
But even worse are the trolls who target end users....

According to the New York Times, President Obama is "on the verge of backing" a proposal by the FBI to introduce legislation dramatically expanding the reach of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. CALEA forces telephone companies to provide backdoors to the government...

In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing "Talk" platform with a new one called "Hangouts" that sharply diminishes support for the...

Bad facts make bad law: it’s legal cliché that is unfortunately based on reality. We saw as much yesterday, in the case of Ryan Hart v. Electronic Arts. Presented with a situation that just seemed unfair, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals proceeded to make a whole bunch of...

When most people think of a trade agreement, they're unlikely to think that it would have anything to do with regulating the Internet. For more than a decade however, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has included copyright enforcement in international trade deals. Such provisions empower countries...

Today, EFF filed a motion in a secret court.
This secret court isn’t in a developing nation, struggling beneath a dictatorship. It’s not in a country experimenting for the first time with a judiciary and the rule of law. And, as Wired recently noted, it’s “not in...

Today, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the Patent Abuse Reduction Act, a wide-ranging bill targeting abusive litigation tactics—a favorite tool of the patent troll.
The good news first. The bill would do significant harm to the patent troll business model, making it harder to be a troll...