The Washington Post recently reported on Facebook’s plans to introduce its international Free Basics app to American users. We have written about the problems with Free Basics before, and we are disappointed that Facebook might be trying to repackage this controversial international program as a solution for domestic...

The Patriot Act turns 15 today, but that’s nothing to celebrate.
Since President George W. Bush signed this bill into law on October 26, 2001, the Patriot Act has been ardently defended by its supporters in the intelligence community and harshly criticized by members of Congress, the tech industry,...

Months of aggressive lobbying by the MPAA and its allies at the Copyright Office gave them the result they desired
Update: a timeline of events based on the Copyright Office e-mails is here.
In the current debate over cable set-top box competition, content and cable industries worked...

Today is the first day of Open Access Week. We’re joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations all week to discuss the importance of open access.
Open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to...

This post is part of the series “Unblinking Eyes: The State of Communications Surveillance in Latin America,” a collaborative project conducted with digital rights partners in Latin America, which documents and analyzes surveillance laws and practices in twelve countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,...

Harvard researcher Yarden Katz has just published some fascinating findings on which universities have sold patents to notorious patent-holding company Intellectual Ventures (IV). Of the nearly 30,000 active patents that IV lists publicly, 470 of them were originally assigned to universities—a total of 61 institutions.
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