1.25.2005, Washington Post
"Disparate Cast Lobbies Court To Restrict File Sharing"
By Jonathan Krim
The entertainment industry yesterday unleashed its latest assault on Internet services that let people swap music and videos, enlisting an array of artists, state officials, academics and others to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on companies that provide file-sharing tools . . . Fred von Lohmann, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has handled much of the legal work for Grokster in the case, said the entertainment industry wants consumers to have to ask permission for how they use music and videos.
He said that if the Supreme Court adopts a standard of whether this kind of product or service is primarily used for illegal purposes, devices such as compact disc burners and the TiVo digital television recorder could be at risk.
Several major technology companies share that concern . . .
"Bill seeks fines for file-share enablers"
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
A talent agent turned California state senator has introduced legislation to impose fines and jail time on creators of Internet file-sharing software who don't take steps to limit piracy. The bill, SB96, seeks to accomplish in the state Legislature what Hollywood has so far failed to win in Congress or the federal courts . . .
"This is unprecedented," said Jason Schultz, an intellectual-property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that promotes free speech on the Internet. "We have never had this level of regulation and control by a government over what technology companies can build and how they design their tools."
01.25.2005, San Jose Mercury News
"Justices to Consider Legal Arguments in High-Profile Grokster Case"
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in a case that pits the entertainment industry against two Internet file-swapping companies, the future of technological innovation may ultimately be on trial. The high-profile case, MGM vs. Grokster, will re-examine for the digital age a 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling that originally paved the way for the videocassette recorder . . .
Litigation has changed the course of technology development, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco advocacy group, outlines in an online exhibit it calls "Endangered Gizmos." (www.eff.org/endangered). The EFF represents StreamCast Networks, operators of Morpheus.
1.26.2005, TechNewsWorld
"'Betamax Principle' Central to Supreme Court P2P Case"
By Jay Lyman
The latest court briefs filed on behalf of those fighting P2P networks Grokster and Morpheus include support from singers Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and Avril Lavigne, as well as entertainment giants such as the National Football League. The recording and movie industries -- which brought suit against the popular file-sharing services -- are joined by 40 state attorneys general and the U.S. government in calling for the P2Ps to be held liable for unlicensed downloads.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Fred von Lohmann noted that the primary issue is the longstanding court stance that technology, even if it is assisting in illegal copying or pirating, is not itself a source of liability. That stance derives from the 1984 Betamax case. While more recent court rulings have found that users of technology can be held liable for copyright infringement, the providers of that technology have not been.
"The briefs they've filed all frontally attack the Betamax principle," he said. "To win, they're going to have to convince the court to change the course of 20 years. The court said no 20 years ago."
Von Lohmann added that the same entertainment groups have historically tried to challenge VCRs, dual-cassette decks, digital video recorders and other technologies that threatened their business models.
"They want the ability to control technologies that impact their business," he said. "We can't afford to allow the entertainment industry to be in charge of our technology in our country."
01.27.2005, Australian Financial Review
"Law reform looms over copy devices"
By John Davidson
In a move that could force sweeping changes on the global information technology and consumer electronics industries, a coalition of the US government and powerful media companies has asked the US Supreme Court to reverse 21 years of copyright law and make many copying devices illegal . . . "What we're seeing is the beginning of the extinction of both current and future gadgets, due to a mix of proposed law, litigation, and over-reaching use of existing law," said Wendy Seltzer, an attorney at the pro-digital-rights lobby group Electronic Frontiers Foundation. Hoping to protect the Betamax decision, EFF has produced an "Endangered Gizmos" list, which includes the Apple iPod and digital TV tuners, which it says will be killed off by lawsuits and changes to the law.
Jan. 16, Associated Press
"Web Site Seeking Defense in Apple suit"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, said Friday it would not defend Think Secret even though it is defending two other sites, AppleInsider.com and PowerPage.org, that Apple is trying to subpoena to reveal sources.
Unlike the Think Secret case, those sites are not being sued.
"In addition to being subpoenaed for sources, he's being directly sued for trade secret misappropriation," said Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney with the organization. "We're trying to find him counsel."
Jan. 17, Sydney Morning Herald
EFF seeks information on Web surveillance
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a request with the US Department of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking the release of documents that would show whether the US government has been using the PATRIOT Act to spy on people's internet reading habits without a search warrant.
In a media release, the EFF said PATRIOT Section 216 expanded the government's ability to spy during criminal investigations using pen registers or trap and trace devices (pen-traps). These collect information about numbers dialled on a telephone but do not record the conversation.
Jan. 18, TechNewsWorld.com
"Internet Group Demands Surveillance Data from DOJ"
A group that defends civil liberties on the Internet has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to determine if the government is secretly gathering information on the surfing habits of citizens.
In a copy of the FOIA obtained by TechNewsWorld, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, "Although Internet users reasonably expect that their online reading habits are private, the DOJ will not confirm whether it collects or believes itself authorized to collect URLs using pen-trap devices."
...To obtain authorization for a pen register or trap and trace device, the government needs to obtain a "certification of relevance" from a court, noted EFF attorney and Bruce J. Ennis Fellow Kevin Bankston. "Rather than go to a judge and give facts leading to a finding of probable cause, which is required by the Constitution to get a search warrant, all the government has to do is certify -- sort of promise to the court without showing any fact -- that it believes the information it is going to collect is relevant to the investigation.
Jan. 19, Associated Press
"Teen Sued By Apple Gets Legal Help From Free Speech Attorney"
A lawyer specializing in freedom of speech and the Internet said
Wednesday he will defend free of charge a 19-year-old publisher of a Web site facing a lawsuit over an article that revealed trade secrets about an Apple computer. Nicholas Ciarelli, publisher of the site www.ThinkSecret.com and a Harvard University student, will be defended by Terry Gross, of the San Francisco-based firm Gross & Belsky . . .Ciarelli had sought legal help from groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that Gross has represented in the past. The EFF declined to take Ciarelli's case. But the group and other civil liberties organizations helped him secure representation from Gross, who said he will handle the case on a pro bono basis.
Jan. 20, TechNewsWorld.com
"California Bill Would Crack Down on P2P Developers"
Anyone who sells, advertises or distributes peer-to-peer (P2P) software without taking "reasonable care" that the software won't be used for an unlawful act would be slapped with a fine up to US$2,500, a year in county jail or both under a bill filed in the California Senate last week.
Although the measure, filed by Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, is aimed at punishing people illegally trafficking in music, movies and child porn on the Internet, critics of the legislation contend it goes far beyond its originator's purported intentions.
...Almost any networking software is included in the definition, maintained Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "So it includes Web browsers, instant messaging -- all kinds of Internet software," he told TechNewsWorld. "It is an unprecedented law," he said. "It is going to affirmatively mandate how tech companies design software. It's going to force them to think of every possible, conceivable illegal use and try to design some way to prevent it. It's going to be madness.
Jan. 21, PC World
Grokster Gets a Date with Supreme Court
...The Supreme Court looks set to revisit many of the arguments discussed in the Sony Betamax case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping defend StreamCast, said this week that it looks forward to the Supreme Court reaffirming the Betamax ruling. It added that like Betamax, Morpheus has substantial noninfringing users . . .
Jan. 8
Slashdot
"EFF Reviews HDTV PVR Solution for Macs"
enrico_suave points out this "PVRBlog post about EFF's Review of Elgato's EyeTV 500, an HDTV solution for the Mac. Well, a very speedy dual-processor G5 Mac, apparently. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing a lot of important work defending our online and digital rights including opposing the dreaded FCC mandated broadcast flag (cue boos and hisses) Elgato and Plextor also have a Standard Definition homebrew PVR solution with an EyeTV and ConvertX PVR bundle . . .
Jan. 10
Boston Globe
"Downhill Battle Wages Uphill Fight Vs. Music Industry"
This month, Downhill Battle is sending a belated Christmas present to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, two Washington-based industry lobbying groups. The gift: stockings filled with coal.
Downhill Battle opposes the lawsuits that the two groups have filed against technologies like BitTorrent and Napster, as well as more than 7,000 individual users of file-sharing software. So in December, Downhill Battle decided to launch its own fund-raiser for three digital rights defense groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation: For every $100 donated to the groups, Downhill Battle would send one lump of coal each to the RIAA and the MPAA.
Jan. 10
ZDNet.com
"Software Firms Want Copyright Law Rewrite"
A group of large software companies has taken the first step toward inciting a tussle with the telecommunications industry by asking Congress to rewrite copyright law so alleged Internet pirates can be more easily targeted by lawsuits.
The group of companies, which is known as the Business Software Alliance, counts as members Microsoft, Autodesk, Borland, Intuit, Sybase and Symantec, among others. The group released a general outline of its suggestions on Thursday in a white paper that effectively describes its legislative proposals for 2005 . . .
Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Business Software Alliance paper "appears to give short shrift to anonymity online. It assumes IP addresses accurately map to individuals. If you think that anonymity has a place online as it does in the real world, then you should begin to ask questions about whether (that's) a good assumption."
Jan. 11, 2005
New York Times
"Free Speech, Or Secrets From Apple?"
Against the backdrop of the Macworld Exposition in San Francisco this week, a series of legal actions filed by Apple Computer over the last month highlights the difficulties of defining who is a journalist in the age of the Web log . . .
An attorney representing AppleInsider and PowerPage asserted that bloggers ought to be extended the same protections as mainstream journalists, who have traditionally been given some latitude by the courts in protecting the identities of confidential sources.
"Bloggers are becoming a more and more critical source of news," said Kurt Opsahl, the lawyer representing the two sites and a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in California. "A lot of confidential tips first start out on the blogs before being picked up in the mainstream media" . . .
Jan. 11
Newsday
"Bloggers' rights up for debate in Apple lawsuit"
A civil-rights group will try to deflect an "asteroid" from hitting bloggers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said yesterday it would defend bloggers' right to protect anonymous sources who disclosed that Apple would release a product code-named "Asteroid." A lawyer for the group said it's one of the first cases nationwide, if not the first case, that would address whether Web loggers, or bloggers, can protect confidential sources. Apple filed the suit last week in California.
The conflict began after two bloggers disclosed on their Web sites in November that Apple would release the so-called "Asteroid," an add-on that would supposedly allow musicians to hook up analog musical instruments to Macintosh computers. Apple then sued the "John Does" for violating trade secret laws by disclosing the information to the bloggers, and the computer maker issued subpoenas to the bloggers to find out the identities of the John Does.
The bloggers shouldn't have to disclose the anonymous sources, said Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the foundation.
"In this case, they're very clearly journalists," he said. "They run a news and information site in which they obtain information and then write up stories about current or upcoming products and the various rumors and speculation that surrounds them." . . .
Jan. 12
C|Net News
When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome, N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state police.
Police suspected the lawyer of ties to a local Hells Angels Motorcycle Club that was selling methamphetamine, and they feared undercover officers would not be able to infiltrate the notoriously tight-knit group, which has hazing rituals that involve criminal activities. So investigators stuck a GPS, or Global Positioning System, bug on Moran's car, watched his movements, and arrested him on drug charges a month later . . .
What's raising eyebrows, though, is the increasingly popular law enforcement practice of secretly tagging Americans' vehicles without adhering to the procedural safeguards and judicial oversight that protect the privacy of homes and telephone conversations from police abuses.
"I think they should get court orders," said Lee Tien, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We're in a world where more and more of our activities can be viewed in public and, perhaps more importantly, be correlated and linked together."
Dec. 22, 2004
Slashdot
"EFF Promotes Freenet-like System Tor"
An anonymous reader writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just announced that it has become a financial sponsor of Tor, an open-source project to help people 'engage in anonymous communication online.' It sounds like a simpler version of Freenet, e.g. 'a network-within-a-network that protects communication from ... traffic analysis.' Like Freenet, the source-code is freely available and binaries exist for Windows, Linux, etc."
Dec. 27, 2004
Haaretz International
"Hollywood's no. 1 Headache"
... Attorney Fred von Lohmann, the man who heads the defensive efforts of the users and the file-sharing services, acting for the Electronic Frontier Foundation - a nonprofit association that promotes freedom of expression on the Internet - says the only thing that surprises him about the MPAA's attack on the BitTorrent sites is that it took this long.
"In my opinion, the decision to move against BitTorrent now is due to the recent reports showing that it is the most popular file-sharing program around," he said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. "It's no surprise. As in the case of the struggle of the record industry against the file-sharing programs, we are seeing that they focus their attack each time against the most popular program in the market at that time. At the beginning, it was Napster, and then Aimster and then AudioGalaxy and then Scour. This is the continuation of the same trend: They notice you and they sue you only when you're really big."
Von Lohmann feels Cohen has no reason to be concerned. He believes the MPAA has no interest in being dragged into a fundamental lawsuit against the developers, similar to that which MGM Studios is waging against Grokster - a suit that will be heard soon by the U.S. Supreme Court. He argues that it is much simpler for them to threaten suit against the operators that link between the pirates and who host the torrents of the files that they download and upload. The costs of the legal struggle against an organization like the MPAA, he says, causes anyone who has received a letter threatening a lawsuit to turn off the switch ...
Dec. 27, 2004
TechNewsWorld.com
"Internet Lib Group Backs Anonymity Project"
... According to EFF Technology Manager Chris Palmer, backing Tor is a way to safeguard on the Internet the real-world right to anonymity established by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "The way the Internet works, you can't necessarily be anonymous," he told TechNewsWorld.
For example, he said, the popular search engine Google tracks the IP addresses of people who use it and assigns a unique user identification to that address in a cookie that resides on a user's hard drive and doesn't expire until 2038. That enables them to link every single search made on Google to a unique user, he explained.
In some cases, collecting an IP address can be tantamount to collecting personal identifying information, he continued. "If you know an IP address, you can find out what Internet service provider has that IP address," he explained. "Then you can subpoena that Internet Service Provider and make them tell you what subscriber of theirs had that IP address at a certain time."That kind of IP harvesting can be thwarted by Tor. "It's not a complete solution for anonymity, probably no one program could be, but it's definitely an important part of the solution," Palmer said ...
Dec. 29, 2004
Riverfront Times
"Double-flushers"
... Some new bills in Congress mark the start of the Download Wars, which will forever change the way we obtain and share music ...
"The recording industry has this problem," says Jason Schultz, attorney for San Francisco technology-liberties watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The people who are their biggest fans are also the people who they are the most mad at, because they're the ones downloading stuff. They've never figured out what to do with this problem, because they want to crack down and sue, but they also don't want to alienate them. So the solution they came up with was, 'Jeez, if we can find some way for the Justice Department to do our dirty work for us, we can crack down on Americans, and they'll blame the government more than they'll blame us.'" ...
Jan. 1, 2005
Mother Jones
"Get Off Your Ass and (Culture) Jam"
Reville and Wilson are the founders of Downhill Battle, a group that has broken new ground in using the Internet as a forum tor civil disobedience. In their latest campaign, the duo mounted a legally dicey protest of a court decision that threatens to curtail the practice of music sampling ...
Ren Bucholz, activism coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, praises the campaign for giving "people a practical way to protest."
... Ask Congress to support legal file sharing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website, action.eff.org.
Jan. 5, 2005
IEEE Spectrum
"DVD Copy Protection: Take 2"
... Critics of the [new DRM] technology say it is bound to fail in achieving its most important objective?blocking wholesale pirating of DVDs?and it may irritate consumers if the promised in-home distribution isn't quickly forthcoming and easy to use. The AACS project "doesn't make very much sense," says Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The commercial copyright infringers in Southeast Asia that burn billions of counterfeit discs will not be deterred by this."
... "The movie-studio people are thinking that by doing this, they can maybe slow commercial copyright infringers down for two weeks, and that would improve their bottom line," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Schoen. "I would be impressed if that is the case. No technical measure ever has been proven to have an effect on these people" ...
Jan. 5, 2005
ITWorld.com
"U.S. Leads world in file-swapping"
... [BigChampaign CEO Eric] Garland said that there was not a huge drop in P-to-P file swapping following the lawsuits, but instead file sharers have become more savvy and download files without sharing them ... Fred Von Lohmann, the senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting civil liberties on the Internet, agreed with Garland. Lawsuits are not substantially decreasing popularity of file sharing because file sharers know how to avoid lawsuits, he said. "It is hard to measure who is just downloading, or 'leaching', and peer-to-peer measurements do not give a picture of how many people are pure downloaders," Von Lohmann said. Both Garland and Von Lohmann estimated that there could be upwards of 100 million P-to-P file swappers worldwide. However, the definition of P-to-P is itself elusive ...
