Of all the bands experimenting with the Internet and its role in enriching their creativity and commerce, OK Go has become one of the canonical success stories, having produced two low-budget, immensely successful viral videos ("A Million Ways" and "Here It Goes Again" in 2006) that together drew...

The Washington Post reported today that the "FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records," using methods that FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni admitted "technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records."
This issue first came to light...

EMI, the smallest of the four major record labels, has sent a cease & desist letter to DJ Lobsterdust and Bootie SF regarding "NirGaga," a mashup combining Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." The song had appeared in Bootie SF's "best of 2009"...

Google has publicly announced that that it will cease censorship of its Chinese language, Google.cn website, and is reviewing the feasibility of its entire operation in that country. This follows its detection of malicious attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and what Google calls an...

The closing months of 2009 saw the beginning of an unfortunate legal dispute in which a trademark owner, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ran to court to punish political activists for using its marks in a political parody. Sadly, less than a week into 2010, another trademark owner, Peabody...

We feel compelled to add our comments about Bono's recent New York Times column, in which he appeared to express a strange hope that ISPs would start spying on their users in the name of protecting America's intellectual property. "We know," says Bono, "from America's noble effort to stop...

According to TorrentFreak, last summer's Star Trek movie was the "most pirated movie of 2009." So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how "Internet piracy" is poised to devastate Hollywood and...

Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion,...

As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon's Kindle to Barnes and Noble's forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how...