Intellectual Property Law

More Silly Trademark Claims: Peabody Energy Threatens ?Clean Coal? Spoof Site

Posted on January 12, 2010
The closing months of 2009 saw the beginning of an unfortunate legal dispute in which a trademark owner, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ran to court to punish political activists for using its marks in a political parody. Sadly, less than a week into 2010, another trademark owner, Peabody Energy, is also using legal threats to attempt to silence criticism...

Putting the "Public" In Publicly-Funded Research

Posted on January 09, 2010
Sometimes an idea is so blindingly, obviously good that you have to wonder why it hasn?t already been implemented. A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had an idea like that. Why not create a free, public, online archive of findings from research studies that were funded by Americans' tax dollars? That way, members of the public could keep up to date on the latest health findings by reading about discoveries that they paid for and would otherwise be unable to access...

Order to Shut Down Websites Critical of Apex Technology Group is Dangerous and Wrong

Posted on January 07, 2010
Over the holidays, a New Jersey court issued an order requiring upstream providers to shut down three anti-H1-B websites that is deeply dangerous and wrong. The order not only tries to remove allegedly defamatory messages but also requires a complete shutdown of the websites and even purports to require the cooperation of the hosting companies and domain registrars of the websites to do so and for other service providers to identify anonymous speakers...

Political Parodists Strike Back Against U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Posted on January 06, 2010
Washington - A group of political activists including members of the Yes Men and the Action Factory have moved to dismiss a meritless lawsuit filed by the United States Chamber of Commerce accusing the activists of infringing the Chamber's trademarks in the course of a political parody highlighting the Chamber's controversial stance on climate change...

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Updated and Corrected: E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy

Posted on January 06, 2010
A few weeks ago, EFF published its first draft of a Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarized and commented on the privacy-related policies and behaviors of several e-readers. In that first draft we incorporated the actual language of the privacy policies as much as possible, which unfortunately created some confusion since companies generally use different language to address similar issues...

Et Tu, U2? Bono, Net Surveillance and the Developing World

Posted on January 06, 2010
We feel compelled to add our comments about Bono's recent New York Times column, in which he appeared to express a strange hope that ISPs would start spying on their users in the name of protecting America's intellectual property. "We know," says Bono, "from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content...

EFF Helps Blogger Subpoenaed by TSA, TSA Backs Down

Posted on January 01, 2010
On December 31, 2009, the Transportation Security Administration backed off on an ill-considered administrative subpoena it issued to trasportation industry blogger, Christopher Elliott. EFF assisted Mr. Elliott in responding to the subpoena. The subpoena was hand-delivered to Mr...

Most Pirated Movie of 2009 ... Makes Heaps of Money

Posted on December 31, 2009
According to TorrentFreak, last summer's Star Trek movie was the "most pirated movie of 2009." So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how "Internet piracy" is poised to devastate Hollywood and (though the nexus here is less than clear) undermine residential broadband in America...

Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book

Posted on December 28, 2009
Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity...

Fighting Internet Censorship in Australia

Posted on December 24, 2009
Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue...

Support EFF's International Work!

Posted on December 22, 2009
The Internet is global, and so are threats to digital freedom. Over the past year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has fought Internet censorship, oppressive copyright laws and privacy violations wherever they've been under threat around the world...

Give to EFF This Holiday Season and Receive Free BookMooch Points

Posted on December 22, 2009
This holiday season, for every $10 you donate to EFF, you can receive one BookMooch point, worth one free book of your choice, from BookMooch founder and EFF board member John Buckman! Just email the receipt of your donation to john@bookmooch.com to redeem your free BookMooch points...

An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy

Posted on December 21, 2009
As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon's Kindle to Barnes and Noble's forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music...

Who Knows Who Your Facebook Friends Are?

Posted on December 21, 2009
As you may have heard by now, one of the biggest problems with Facebook's recent privacy overhaul was that it removed users' ability to hide their friend lists from the world. This was one of several changes that were met with substantial criticism and anger from the media and from Facebook users...

The World Reacts to The New Facebook

Posted on December 17, 2009
It's been a little over a week since Facebook debuted a massive revamp of its privacy settings. EFF immediately followed that release with a detailed critique, concluding that the changes were "clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before [and] will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data...

Intelligence Agencies Release Docs Describing Misconduct in Response to EFF Lawsuit

Posted on December 16, 2009
Today the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency released 162 pages of intelligence oversight reporting in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by EFF in July...

minilinks for 2009-16-12

Posted on December 16, 2009
NYT Editorial: Twitter TappingThe Times' editorial board speaks out in support of EFF's lawsuit seeking government guidelines for the monitoring of social networking sites. District Court: Personal E-Mail From Work Still PrivilegedA federal prosecutor had a reasonable expectation of privacy when he sent personal email to his lawyer over government computers, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled...

Good News from WIPO: U.S. Delegation Supports Visually Impaired Citizens

Posted on December 15, 2009
This week the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is meeting in Geneva to discuss a proposed treaty intended to increase access to books and other information in formats accessible to the world's blind, visually impaired and print disabled citizens...

EFF's Five Famous Friends Of Freedom

Posted on December 15, 2009

EFF Fights for Anonymity for Online Critic in Friday Hearing

Posted on December 15, 2009
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked a federal judge in San Francisco to quash a baseless subpoena aimed at outing an anonymous online critic of a Pennsylvania company called USA Technologies. A hearing in the case is set for Friday...

Help EFF - Times Two

Posted on December 11, 2009
So, you can help EFF times two by taking these two easy steps right now: Sign the Open Letter to President Obama. When President Obama took office, he promised to usher in a new era of government transparency, and instructed federal government agencies to comply with Freedom Of Information Act Requests "promptly and in a spirit of cooperation...

Real ID Follies Continue with PASS ID Waiting in the Wings

Posted on December 11, 2009
As 2009 draws to a close, we're inching ever deeper into the corner that Congress painted us into by passing Real ID under the table in 2005. (Recall that Real ID is the failed, Bush-era attempt to turn state drivers licenses into national ID cards by forcing states to collect and store licensee data in databases, and refusing to accept non-compliant IDs for federal purposes, like boarding a plane or entering a federal building...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy

Posted on December 10, 2009
Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a "trusted friend," Schmidt responded, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place...

Be A Superhero - Give Today and Get an EFF xkcd Shirt

Posted on December 10, 2009
For twenty years, supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have helped an elite team of technologists and activists create an unparalleled force in the digital rights world. Randall Munroe, creator of the online comic xkcd, tells it best: To thank our year-end donors, we are offering special edition EFF 20th anniversary xkcd t-shirts and hooded sweatshirts! This exclusive xkcd apparel is available only for a limited time and will be shipped in January 2010...

Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Posted on December 09, 2009
Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users. The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency...

White House Takes Another Step Toward Greater Transparency

Posted on December 08, 2009
The Obama Administration today issued its long-awaited Open Government Directive (OGD), a blueprint for transparency that the President promised on January 21, his first full day in office. The OGD is ?intended to direct executive departments and agencies to take specific actions to implement the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration? the President spoke of as he took office, and it is hopefully the first of many concrete steps that will be taken to alter the entrenched culture of secrecy that pervades the federal government...

EFF Submits Brief in Key State Secrets Privilege Case

Posted on December 07, 2009
EFF filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit's en banc review of Mohamed v. Jeppesen, a case brought by the ACLU challenging the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had rejected the government's argument that the case had to be dismissed at the outset due to the state secrets privilege...

Latest Bogus DMCA Takedown Award Winner: Yahoo!

Posted on December 07, 2009
"Yahoo isn?t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web." That's how WIRED's Threat Level blog put it when describing Yahoo's recent effort to censor its own law enforcement compliance guide off the Internet using a bogus DMCA takedown demand...

Terms of (Ab)use: Are Terms of Service Enforceable?

Posted on December 04, 2009
In the first of a series of white papers on Terms of Service (TOS) issues, EFF today released The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users ?Agree? to Online Terms of Service. The paper aims to answer a fundamental question: when do these ubiquitous TOS agreements actually become binding contracts? We discuss how courts have reacted to efforts by service providers to enforce TOS, and suggest best practices for service providers to follow in presenting terms to a user and for seeking his or her agreement to them...

Google Books Settlement 2.0: Evaluating Censorship

Posted on December 03, 2009
This is the fifth in a series of posts about the proposed Google Book Search settlement. As we've explained in earlier posts, when it comes to evaluating the proposed Google Books settlement, the principal potential benefit to the public (increased access to books online) must be weighed against the potential drawbacks (impediments to competition, inadequate protection for privacy)...

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