Last week, a California Superior Court judge ruled that Kaleidescape did not violate its contract with the DVD DRM licensing authority by distributing a home media server that rips and plays DVDs. This is an important victory for consumers, but it's also a sad reminder of how your...

The Utah legislature has quietly passed a dangerous law allowing trademark owners to prevent their marks from being used as keywords to generate comparative ads. If this law takes effect, a company like Chevrolet couldn't purchase "sponsored link" space on the Google results page when a user types "Toyota" as...

In a little-noticed report entitled Filesharing Programs and "Technological Features to Induce Users to Share," the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has decided to attack several leading P2P software applications for making user interface decisions that allegedly "dupe" users into sharing files unintentionally. In hyperbole that is all...

The latest development in the RIAA's long-running filesharing shakedown campaign--demanding colleges and universities forward "pre-litigation" settlement offers to their students--has placed academic institutions in an untenable position. If they don't pass on the letters or even make them available to students, they are arguably harming those students by depriving them...

On behalf of MoveOn.org and Brave New Films, EFF and Stanford's Fair Use Project today filed a lawsuit against Viacom for improperly issuing a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube over "Stop the Falisiness," a humorous video built around clips from The Colbert Report. Viacom promptly responded in ...

When it was sold to politicians in Brussels, the pitch for the directive on criminal measures aimed at enforcing IP rights in Europe (IPRED2), was all about commercial piracy and counterfeit goods that endanger health and safety. The reality has turned out quite different. The current draft directive — adopted...