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Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance

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Our Work

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Request for Depublication of Novartis v. SHAC

On December 8 2006 EFF and Professor Deirdre Mulligan and Jack Lerner requested the depublication of Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Inc. v. Stop Huntingdon Cruelty USA Inc. (2006) 143 Cal.App.4th 1284 Ct. of App. Nos. A107538 & A108292. Novartis was decided on October 12 2006 about a month prior to...

RIAA v. Charter Communications Archive

The RIAA sought to force the Missouri ISP Charter Communications to turn over the identities of its customers who the RIAA believed had engaged in peer to peer filesharing.Outcome: 8th Circuit Court of Appeals held that RIAA could not use pre-litigation DMCA subpoenas and instead must file regular lawsuits explicitly...

Trademark

1-800 Contacts v. WhenU

Trademark law at its heart is intended to protect consumers from confusion -- for example by preventing Pepsi from passing off its cola as Coca-Cola. Increasingly however trademark owners are trying to use their trademarks in ways that actually harm consumers by restricting their access to information from and about...

2003 DMCA Rulemaking

In 2003 EFF applied for four exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) asking the Copyright Office to allow consumers to:Play copy-protected audio CDs that malfunction to prevent playbackView foreign region-coded DVD movies on U.S. playersFast-forward through unskippable commercials prior to movies on DVDsPlay and make full use of...

2009 DMCA Rulemaking

In the 2009 rulemaking EFF won three critical exemptions protecting the important work of video remix artists iPhone owners and cell phone recyclers from legal threats.
The first proposal was aimed at protecting the video remix culture currently thriving on Internet sites like YouTube. The filing asked for...

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20th Century Fox v. Cablevision

Most people assume that consumers have a fair use right to time shift television to watch at a later time. As a result lots of companies now sell digital video recorders (DVRs) that enable you to do this including TiVo and it's generally accepted that selling DVRs is perfectly legal...

Copyright Troll

Achte-Neunte v. Does

EFF has asked judges in Washington D.C. to quash subpoenas issued in predatory lawsuits aimed at movie downloaders arguing in friend-of-the court briefs that the cases which together target several thousand BitTorrent users flout legal safeguards for protecting individuals' rights. Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation...

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Ashcroft v. ACLU

EFF extended free speech protections online, successfully challenging the constitutionality of Internet censorship laws. In 1996, EFF and a coalition of public interest groups sued to block the Communications Decency Act, which criminalized publishing certain content online that the government clearly could not prohibit offline. Unanimously, the U.S. Supreme Court...

ACRA v. Lexmark

Lexmark one of the largest makers of laser printers is a believer in the "give away the razors but charge them for the blades" tactic counting on the fact that consumers routinely underestimate "life cyle costs" for products like printers. In other words if you low- ball you customers on...

Al Haramain v. Obama

This case alleges alleges that the Bush Administration illegally targeted the leaders of an Islamic charity and their lawyers for warrantless surveillance by the NSA. Their claims are based on a secret document that was accidentally disclosed to the plaintiffs by the government that the plaintiffs allege demonstrates they were...

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ALA v. FCC

EFF established that the FCC and Hollywood don't control your TiVo - you do. The FCC's "broadcast flag" mandate would have given copyright holders and the government a veto over development and use of digital television tuners. Only technologies crippled by copy protection would have been legal. The DC Circuit...

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