Finally. The major record labels are coming around to voluntary collective licensing, as we've been urging (and predicting) since 2003. Last week, TechDirt posted a set of leaked slides suggesting that Warner Music Group has opened a discussion with several major U.S. universities about creating a collective licensing...

In the last few days, President-elect Obama's transition team took a significant stride towards a more open government by licensing the content of Change.gov under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Using that license essentially means that the transition team is allowing others to freely share and remix what's posted...

Once again, thanks to DRM, a new product ends up less useful than the one it replaces. This time, it's the new family of Apple Macbook laptop computers that gets the downgrade.When it launched the new Macbooks, Apple announced that they would sport a new digital video output...

[I wrote the following op-ed, which appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of The Recorder. Because that publication's website is not publicly available, I'm posting a copy here, with their permission.]For most of the decade, Silicon Valley technology startups have assumed that Google would pay their legal bills. Not literally,...

Last year, we reported that WIPO Member States had decided to postpone holding an intergovernmental diplomatic conference to adopt the controversial Broadcasting Treaty. For us, and the many others who had expressed concern about the proposed treaty, this was welcome news. But it was short-lived. In 2008, the...

The blogosphere is doing a great job examining the legacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was enacted into law ten years ago this week. But people frequently ask me where they can turn for a more in-depth analysis of the DMCA, DRM, and...

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998. EFF is marking the occasion with the release of a 19-page report that focuses on the most notorious part of the law: the ban on "circumventing" digital...

Now that the dust has settled on the anti-Scientology video takedown controversy, it's time to take stock. For those of you who missed this one: on September 4th and 5th, hundreds and possibly thousands of videos critical of the Church of Scientology were taken down as a result of...

A new book containing explosive details about the NSA's illegal spying program hits stores today. Barton Gellman's "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," excerpted in the Washington Post in two parts (1 & 2), brings to light new information about the warrantless wiretapping scandal and the role played...

Real Networks has received quite a bit of attention thanks to the launch of its Real DVD software, designed to allow people to copy their DVDs to their hard drives for later playback. (Why is that a big deal? Because Hollywood DVDs are encrypted with CSS, and...