If you are a vidder, a movie trailer mashup creator, YouTube movie critic, or anyone else who needs to take clips from DVDs in order to make an original remix video, you might be interested in the hearings held last week before the U.S. Copyright Office,...

This Friday, May 1, the U.S. Copyright Office comes to Stanford Law School to hold hearings on proposed exemptions to the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing technical protection measures (i.e., DRM). The hearings will be open to the public, and are scheduled to run from 9a to 5p....

In recent weeks, there have been a number of important developments relating to the the Google Book Search settlement, currently awaiting approval before a court in New York. As we've written previously, this settlement would end the litigation that has pitting book publishers and authors against Google over...

Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Government's expansive view of the state secrets privilege, allowing an "extraordinary rendition" case against Jeppesen Dataplan to proceed. In the case, which was brought by the ACLU, the plaintiffs allege that "Jeppesen provided flight planning and logistical support services...

When President Obama – in one of his first official acts – committed his new administration to an "unprecedented" level of transparency, EFF applauded the change in policy. Likewise, when Attorney General Holder, at the President's direction, issued new guidelines liberalizing agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act...

In a what could be a potentially serious blow to Google's AdWords business, and to consumers’ ability to find information about competing offerings on the Internet, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that a trademark owner can sue Google for trademark infringement for selling its mark as...

The lawsuits between Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic tricolor Obama "Hope" poster) and the Associated Press have an interesting legal wrinkle that is worth examining: AP claims that Fairey violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the creation of the famous poster.
The AP ...

The battle to control online music has taken a particularly outrageous turn. As if private censorship, fines, intimidation and blacklisting weren't enough, now the Department of Justice — for the first time we're aware of — is threatening to throw a man in jail for noncommercial music-sharing.The...

In April 2007, as part of our Patent Busting Project, we asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to revisit its decision to grant NeoMedia a patent that broadly claimed to cover database lookups using things like barcodes. In October 2007, the PTO agreed to take...

Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking.Apple's iPhone, now the best-selling cellular...