On May 26, 2015, Atlanta-based attorney Scott A. Horstemeyer sued the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleging that he was defamed by the April Stupid Patent of the Month blog post. Horstemeyer has demanded that EFF remove the post and publish an editorial repudiating it. EFF has declined this request and...

On Sunday, the Senate let Section 215 of the Patriot Act expire, and voted 77-17 to move the USA Freedom Act of 2015 forward for consideration. Unfortunately on the next day, Senators Richard Burr and Bill Nelson took to the Senate floor to rail against NSA reform and make...

Senate to Vote on USA FREEDOM Act Later in the WeekSection 215 has expired. At least for now.The law that the NSA used to authorize its collection of vast amounts of information about the telephone calls of ordinary Americans is no more. Even though it’s likely temporary, it’s a good...

When a criminal started lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly sprang into action to ensure consumer safety. It increased its internal production controls, recalled the capsules, offered an exchange for tablets, and within two months started using triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging. The company focused on...

In choosing this month’s Stupid Patent, we realized that we couldn’t choose just one. Instead, we decided to give the award to the entirety of patent class 705.
By way of explanation: every Tuesday, the Patent Office officially publishes new patents in the “Patent Gazette.” (This week’s is...

The US Senate did something big last week. In a midnight session, the Senate clearly rejected a clean reauthorization of the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program, voting 45-54 against proceeding with S. 1357, a two-month reauthorization of Section 215 and two other expiring provisions of the Patriot Act.
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We’re happy to announce that the New Jersey Attorney General has dropped its investigation of Tidbit as detailed in a consent order filed yesterday in Essex County Superior Court in New Jersey.Tidbit was a project of four Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students who developed the software for a...