Dec. 14, Associated Press
"Server operators sued in bid to stymie online movie piracy"

Operators of more than 100 U.S.- and European-based computer servers that help relay digitized movie files over the Internet are
being sued by the Motion Picture Association of America ... The suits follow the same logic employed when the recording industry successfully sued the original Napster file-sharing network. The creators of that software used a central computer server to keep and update an index of what music files were being made available by computer users on the network.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, suggested Tuesday's lawsuits would backfire.

"By bringing these suits, the MPAA runs the risk of pushing the tens of millions of file sharers to more decentralized technologies that will be harder to police," von Lohmann said ...

Dec. 16, Digital-Lifestyles.info
"Creative Archive Gathers English MP Support"

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the UK House of Commons today released the first volume of
its report, "A public BBC." The committee, made up of eleven cross party Members of Parliament (MP),
has taken evidence both written and through expert witness panels going back as far as May 2004 ...

Details of material about the Creative Archive [PDF] ...

63. The Electronic Frontier Foundation espouses the benefits that will accompany the
establishment of the BBC's Creative Archive, and supports its becoming a core element of BBC services ...

Dec. 16, Red Herring
"Peer to Peer TV"

Want 24-hour Hasselhoff? You?re in luck. New German peer-to-peer software will let users upload and rebroadcast all the Baywatch they want.

German software engineers Guido Ciberski and Petra Bauersachs are promising to introduce software they call ?Cybersky TV? this January. They claim Cybersky TV will use peer-to-peer technology to carry live television feeds. If the service gets enough users, its first broadcasts in February could revolutionize TV and guarantee a deluge of lawsuits ...

Legal experts say Mr. Ciberski won?t be disappointed. ?I?m sure this will raise copyright hackles,? says Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Already, Mr. Ciberski plans to launch his company in a country with liberal copyright laws. Though he declines to identify potential countries, the move is common for file-sharing networks. Kazaa, for example, transferred operations and ownership to several locales, including Estonia, Vanuatu, and Australia ...

Dec. 17, Computer Business Review
"Tech Industry — Beware Acacia Research"

Lawsuit-happy Acacia Research Corp has acquired more patents, in the US and abroad, broadening its base of potential licensing and litigation targets beyond the digital video market that it has spent the last couple of years attacking ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has the DMT patent at the top of its "most wanted" list of patents that need to be "busted", calls it a "laughably broad patent would cover everything from online distribution of home movies to scanned documents and MP3s" ...

The EFF notes that Acacia is happy to sue small businesses. Adult webmasters, most of which did not have the resources to defend themselves, were Acacia's first target for enforcing the DMT patent. Wins there were then leveraged as precedent to extract cash from the cable industry ...

Dec. 17, Reuters News
"DirecTV sues Calif. lawyer over piracy documents"

A California lawyer who accuses DirecTV of shaking down innocent people as part of its war on piracy has been sued by the satellite TV company to recover internal documents, court papers showed on Friday ...
DirecTV was criticized, and lost a federal court battle this year, for casting too wide a dragnet for pirates, Jason Schultz, lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.

"We have a David and Goliath thing - DirecTV against numerous folks who can barely afford lawyers," Schultz said. "We were getting about a dozen calls a week for awhile from people who never stole any TV, asking what to do."

Schultz said the situation had improved since an appellate ruling, but added that "hundreds" of innocent people had paid the fines to avoid being sued.

A federal law prevents those who win piracy cases against DirecTV from recovering their court costs, he said.

Nov. 4, Dagens Naeringsliv
"Ny runde piratsoksmal"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), som blant annet kjemper for
forbrukernes rettigheter pa nettet, er nadelose i sin kritikk av RIAAs
fremgangsmate.

A saksoke dine kunder en etter en er ikke en forretningsmodell, sier
EFF-advokat Fred von Lohmann til Wired News.

Dec. 4, Red Herring
"And the question is - who is a big bully?"

Since July, New York blogger Jason Kottke faithfully reported the story of Ken Jennings? amazing run on Jeopardy. Just for fun ... Sony lawyers called Mr. Kottke the day of his post, said the blogger, and told him he was breaking copyright laws. The suits demanded that he take down the audio spoiler ...

Sony representatives declined numerous invitations to comment on the matter, but Internet law experts did not.

"I think it's possible that Sony thinks individual bloggers are more easily intimidated," said Wendy Seltzer, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney who specializes in intellectual property law. "I don?t think they had a reasonable request. A short audio clip - not a full show - could be a fair use in the context of news reporting. Jason Kottke was reporting an event that had, in fact, happened. And just because television producers wanted to treat it as suspense media, doesn't mean that it's not also news."

Dec. 7, Associated Press
"Bankrupt Commerce One Gets $15.5M In Patent Sale"

The auction fetched a price that seemed to amaze many of the participants, although an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said it wasn't a total surprise, given the potential royalties at stake.

"I suspect that a price like this means that the buyer is to require a
substantial rate of return," said Jason Schultz.

In addition to major corporations, many smaller companies are at risk, too, because the mere threat of an expensive legal battle could be enough to pressure many of them to enter into licensing agreements. Defending against a patent infringement case can cost millions of dollars - a bill many small companies can't afford.

"You might see a strategy where the owner (of the Commerce One) patents just tries to shake down small companies," Schultz said.

Dec. 8, Counterpunch
"The Ohio Recount: Reluctant Officials and Few Rules"

Getting election officials to agree to an analysis of voting machines has proved difficult. On November 22, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) announced that they had sent letters to voting officials in eight counties around the country urging them to allow independent testing of their electronic voting machines ... The response so far from these counties? "Pretty much zilch," says EFF staff attorney Matt Zimmerman who notes that many county officials are under heavy pressure to certify the vote ...

Even when election activists appeal to the courts, Zimmerman says judges often give local election officials broad authority on how to conduct machine audits ... According to Zimmerman, a state court ruled that local election officials could decide what recount data is relevant and the case is now on appeal.

"If we wanted to get close to voter intent, that would mean going to machines individually to look at data," said Zimmerman. "But a judge is mostly going to defer to election officials and the law does not require them to look at individual machines and undergo the labor intensive task to get the vote counts - the judge will not require them to do that" ...

EFF is trying to use the Open Records Act to get access to voting data, but Zimmerman said it cannot be used effectively to impound voting machines. "It underscores the notion that election laws have not caught up to technology," said Zimmerman. "Right now we are up against a ticking clock and time is running out to uncover problems and malfeasance that might have been examined."

Dec. 12, Out-law.com
Defamation for Third-Party Statements: Case Continues"

Civil rights groups have warned the California Supreme Court that an adverse ruling in a case concerning the liability of an individual who posted a statement made by another person on an internet newsgroup would chill the free speech rights of internet users.

The case concerns a defamation suit brought against Ilena Rosenthal, Director of the Humantics Foundation in San Diego, a breast implant awareness organisation, after she re-posted a third-party?s statements on the internet. These, it was alleged, defamed Terry Polevoy, an opponent of "quackery, health and diet fraud" ...

Rosenthal appealed to the State Supreme Court, and in April the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case ... In November civil rights groups the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU) filed a friend of the court brief, supporting Rosenthal's case.

In their brief, EFF and the ACLU argued that prior to the Appeals Court ruling, similar attempts to eliminate the protections created in the Act had been almost universally rejected. If the court finds in favor of the plaintiffs, the implications for free speech on-line are far-reaching, said the brief. Bloggers could be held liable when they quote other people's writing, and web site owners could be held liable for what people say in message boards on their sites. The end result, according to the groups, is that many people would simply cease to publish or host web sites.

"Every other jurisdiction addressing Section 230 has given effect to Congress' broad protections and internet speech has flourished as a result," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "The Court of Appeals upset this settled law and we are simply asking the California Supreme Court to set things right."

Dec. 13, Wall St. Journal
Supreme Court to Review File-Sharing Ruling"

The Supreme Court agreed to consider whether file-sharing services can be held responsible for illegal trading of copyrighted material using their software, giving the entertainment industry hope that it can overturn an adverse appeals-court ruling with implications for the fight against piracy. Justices will review an August ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that file-sharing companies aren't liable for copyright infringement that takes place within their networks... The Ninth Circuit drew on a 1984 Supreme Court decision involving Betamax, a video recorder sold by Sony Corp. In that case, the justices ruled that Sony couldn't be held liable for copyright infringement by Betamax customers, because Betamax had legal uses as well as illegal ones.

The Betamax rule "has served technologists and the content community very well," said Cindy Cohn, legal director at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing StreamCast in the case. "We hope the court will agree, or if they make adjustments, do it in a way that upholds the spirit of Betamax."

Dec. 13, Salon.com
"When Dot-com Patents Go Bad"
(an editorial by EFF's own staff attorney Jason Schultz)

... While the sale of patents is nothing new, the Commerce One patent auction highlights a disturbing trend in our current patent system.

When faced with two choices -- selling a company's patents as part of its overall assets or selling the patents alone -- the court (and the market) chose the latter. This means that in the eyes of the legal system and the marketplace, the Commerce One patents were more valuable to independent licensing firms as legal threats than they were to an actual company that makes a Web services product ...
...

June 7, Der Spiegel
"Amerikaner entdeckt neue Rekord-Primzahl"

... Etwa 75 000 Mathe-Maniacs aus der ganzen Welt beteiligen sich
derzeit an der "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search". Die
idealistische Suche konnte sich schon bald fur einen der nachsten
Finder lohnen: 100 000 Dollar hat die "Electronic Frontier Foundation"
fur die erste Primzahl mit mehr als zehn Millionen Stellen ausgelobt
...

Nov. 22, Wired News
"A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?"

The Senate passed a scaled-back version of a controversial copyright
bill Saturday, keeping a provision that imposes severe penalties on
people caught with camcorders in movie theaters but scrapping other
provisions that copyright-reform activists had criticized ...

"We're certainly relieved that (the bill) doesn't have new criminal
penalties for file sharers," said Wendy Seltzer, an attorney with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Senators dropped that section -- HR4077 -- which would have lowered the standard for copyright infringement.
"It took 'willfulness' out of the definition of a criminal violation,
so you could be judged a criminal without willfully infringing
copyright," Seltzer said. A person who had 1,000 songs on their
computer in a music folder and who didn't intend to make the files
public could be nabbed ...

Nov. 23, The Register
Griffin, Froomkin join EFF board"

...All credit to the EFF for recognizing that fresh thinking is
needed. The group's most notable successes have been on behalf of
individuals who've falled foul of the rights' holders ugly use of
litigation: such as "DVD Jon" Johansen and Dmitri Sklyarov. But the
group has been outflanked at almost every turn by the better-funded
copyright lobby. At times it's even managed to snatch defeat from the
jaws of victory: for example in the case of Senator Orrin Hatch. Hatch
was so disgusted by the way the recording industry treated artists he
threatened to introduce flat fee licenses, but was wooed by persistent
flattery from the RIAA. He's now one of the staunchest pigopolist
advocates.

And earlier this year much of the organization's outstanding work on
privacy was undone by Brad Templeton 'Google isn't so spooky' analysis
of GMail, which kindly overlooked the implications of Google's defense
of the service: that only machines read your email. As former DoJ
cybercrime czar Mark Rausch pointed out here, that's an invitation for
the the FBI to point its machines at your email too, and make the same
defense.

Ah, what problems, what confusion these techno utopians create for
themselves! So not all of the EFF's ineffectiveness can be explained
by a lack of resources, or its location: 2,300 miles further from
Congress than its rival lobby groups. The organization was born out of
the popular technical ethos of libertarianism, in which compromise is
distrusted and direct political engagement is shunned for a faith in
market forces. And being lawyers, they like to fight cases, naturally.

"They like to lose - they feed on the indignation," thunders one
reader, who characterizes the EFF as "a bumbling third-rate ACLU with
high-tech airs. They're mucking about with some important cases, and
every time they lose, we lose"...

Dec. 2, The Economist

href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%29%28%3C%2EP1%5F%23%20P%214%0A&tranMode=none">"In Praise of P2P"

Despite the legal wrangles over music piracy, peer-to-peer
technology has many uses and is here to stay ...

Using a peer-to-peer approach for content distribution stands the
traditional limitations of the internet on its head, says Cory
Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a high-tech lobby
group. P2P does away with the popularity penalty; that makes desirable
content difficult to obtain. With systems such as BitTorrent, the more
a file is in demand, the more available it becomes. Content
automatically ends up being stored close to the users who request it,
improving the performance of the system ...

Dec. 3, New York Times
"Music Industry Turns to Napster Creator for Help"

Mr. Fanning, now 24 and part of a new venture called Snocap, has
lately written software that would recognize songs being made
available on a peer-to-peer network and let copyright holders set
terms for its price and its use by consumers who wish to download them
... The networks have long argued - and a federal appeals court has
agreed - that they cannot monitor their users. But the music companies
may argue that Snocap proves that it is possible to track and block
the transmission of unauthorized content.

"I just view this as an exercise in R.I.A.A. propaganda," said Fred
Von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring
to the Recording Industry Association of America. Mr. Von Lohmann
represents StreamCast Networks, the company that releases Morpheus
software. "If you care about copyright," he added, "why would you want
to drive people to more offshore, encrypted, anonymous kinds of
networks? That's all this would accomplish." ...