There is mounting concern in some quarters that the Google Book Search settlement (see previous posts here, here, and here) could have anticompetitive effects. Everyone (including Google) seems to agree that, all else being equal, we shouldn't want a world where Google is the...

Before legislation becomes law in France, it must pass the muster of the Conseil Constitutionnel: a group of jurists who determine whether each new law is consistent with the principles and rules of France's constitution.
For the passage of Sarkozy's unpopular "three strikes" HADOPI legislation, the...

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and IT's announcement that all PCs sold in China must include government-approved filtering software is a profoundly worrying development for online privacy and free speech in that country. While the application, "Green Dam Youth Escort", claims to only block pornographic sites, the access to...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, here's one that vividly illustrates why putting DRM on e-books is short-sighted, futile, and doomed. If you must have words, here are a few explaining this photo. And here are a few more wherein Microsoft security engineers explain...

Last week, after months of work, EFF launched Teaching Copyright, a balanced, fact-based curriculum for high school educators looking to discuss copyright issues in the classroom. We decided the time was right to unveil the project after the debut of the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation (CAEF), which is...

This blog post appeared today in the ACSblog of the American Constitution Society.
National commitment to cybersecurity is welcome, but government control of the internet is not. This morning's White House-issued cybersecurity proposals seem to recognize this distinction and are therefore vastly preferable to the Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity...

For years, it's been a notoriously popular internet meme to remix the "bunker scene" from the 2004 film "Downfall." In the original scene, actor Bruno Ganz portrays Adolf Hitler's ranting breakdown in the final days of the Third Reich. In the hands of internet remixers, the scene's English-language subtitles...

We at EFF have long lamented that, too often, incumbent industry leaders use law as a weapon to quell disruptive innovators, to the detriment of competition, innovation, and the public. Here's how Larry Downes puts it in a recent Forbes interview about his forthcoming book due out in October,...

Eucalyptus is the name of an e-book reader app for the iPhone. It allows you to read public domain books that have been digitized by the volunteers at Project Gutenberg. Apple has rejected Eucalyptus for inclusion in the iTunes App Store because one of the books archived at...

In the tradition of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," EFF board member and Princeton Computer Science Prof. Ed Felten has written an essay in response to the recently passed "3 strikes" legislation in France:
Yesterday the French parliament adopted a proposal to create a "three-strikes"...