Today, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court order imposing sanctions on Evan Stone, attorney for adult film producer Mick Haig Productions, who improperly issued subpoenas without leave of court to ISPs seeking the identities of anonymous subscribers in a mass end-user copyright infringement case....

Copyright trolls lost one of their knobby clubs this week. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. district court in Manhattan ruled that the owner of an Internet connection cannot be found liable for "negligence" simply because another person uses his wifi connection to commit copyright infringement -- even if he...

Despite Twitter's (and our) best efforts, it has been ordered to disclose to the government all of the information it has on an Occupy Wall Street protester.
We've been following the case of Malcolm Harris' -- arrested in connection with the OWS Brooklyn Bridge protest in October...

The patent system is broken. We’ve been talking about it for years, and we just rolled out a new site (defendinnovation.org) to do something about it, where we hope you’ll join us in coming up with solutions that make sense for innovation.
Now we've got some...

Yesterday, a House Committee grabbed national attention by voting to approve a recommendation that Attorney General Eric Holder be held in contempt of Congress. The vote stemmed from the Department of Justice’s repeated refusals to release documents concerning the handling of an investigation known as “Fast and Furious” –...

Once again, the federal government is trying its hardest to prevent the courts from determining whether it has broken (or is still breaking) the law through the NSA’s wiretapping program.
For nearly four years, the Obama Administration has followed in the Bush administration’s footsteps, invoking national security and a...

DNA is the most intimate and revealing part of the human body, with the potential to reveal a person -- and their family's -- medical history and predisposition to disease. Because it's so sensitive, we've filed an amicus brief (PDF) in the California Supreme Court urging it to...

Innovation for the win: A federal judge ruled today that Java's APIs are not copyrightable. The federal district judge in the widely reported Oracle v. Google case ruled in favor of innovation and interoperability, allowing software to use Application Programming Interfaces without paying a license fee....

The Senate is moving quickly to take up the issue of cybersecurity, with a potential vote looming in early June. This is a particularly dangerous situation because the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) already passed the House, authorizing companies to spy on sensitive user content and pass that...

This week, the Supreme Court put to rest any doubt that when it invalidated a patent that added nothing novel to an otherwise unpatentable idea back in March, it was talking about software patents, too. In that case, Mayo v. Prometheus, the Court reviewed the three types of inventions that...