Intellectual Property Law

Wiki Operator Sues Apple Over Bogus Legal Threats

Posted on April 27, 2009
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against Apple Inc. today to defend the First Amendment rights of an operator of a noncommercial, public Internet "wiki" site known as BluWiki. EFF and the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest represent OdioWorks LLC, which runs the BluWiki website...

RealDVD v. DVD-CCA: The Duel Begins In Earnest

Posted on April 25, 2009
Opening shots were fired Friday in the RealNetworks v. DVD-CCA case. Unfortunately, the public was excluded from key parts of the battle, when the presiding judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, granted DVD-CCA's request to close the courtroom. Some quick background: In September 2008, the motion picture industry sued RealNetworks over its RealDVD software, which was designed to allow consumers to copy their DVDs to their computers for later playback...

minilinks for 2009-02-24

Posted on April 24, 2009
EU Parliament Approves 70 Year Copyright for RecordingsSound recordings would be copyrighted for 70 years under a new proposal passed by the parliament -- not the 95 years that had been sought -- but the Council of Ministers have yet to agree. Dude, Where's My Downloadable Movie Service?The technology exists, the demand exists...

Scholarships Now Available for EFF Bootcamp on May 11: Apply Now!

Posted on April 24, 2009
Thanks to the generosity of Google, we can now offer scholarships to individuals who wish to attend the EFF Bootcamp on User-Generated Content taught by EFF attorneys on May 11 at Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco. If you would like to attend the bootcamp, but cannot afford the fee, send us a short note at bootcamp@eff...

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Wikipedia Threatens Artists for Fair Use

Posted on April 23, 2009
Can a noncommercial critical website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not. Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia?s standards of credibility and verifiability...

Testing YouTube's Audio Content ID System

Posted on April 23, 2009
An enterprising YouTube user has completed a fascinating set of tests to figure out how sensitive the audio fingerprinting tools are in YouTube's Content ID system. (This is the system being used by Warner Music Group to do wholesale censorship of music, including clear fair uses, on YouTube...

LA Times on Latest Congressional P2P Witch Hunt

Posted on April 22, 2009
The L.A. Times Technology Blog hits the nail on the head, responding to news that the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent out letters asking for help investigating security breaches caused when government employees and contractors who use P2P software accidentally share information on networks like Lime Wire...

Rep. Jane Harman Changes Her Tune On Wiretapping

Posted on April 21, 2009
Reports in Congressional Quarterly and the New York Times indicate that a National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap authorized by the FISA Court recorded Rep. Jane Harman trading political favors with a suspected Israeli agent. When the FBI attempted to open a criminal investigation into the matter, Attorney General Gonzales allegedly intervened because he "'needed Jane' to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program...

Doctorow's Law: Who Benefits from DRM?

Posted on April 20, 2009
In a reprise of his famous argument against DRM delivered to Microsoft executives in 2004, Cory Doctorow recently appeared before book publishers at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference to explain to leaders of the publishing industry why DRM on digital books is bad for customers, bad for authors, and bad for business...

EFF Urges Kentucky Judges to Uphold Block on Domain Name Seizure

Posted on April 20, 2009
Frankfort, KY - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), and the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky (ACLU of Kentucky) on Friday urged the Kentucky Supreme Court to uphold an appeals court ruling that blocked state officials from ordering out-of-state registrars to turn over control of over 100 overseas Internet domain names accused of violating state gambling laws...

Senator Specter: "The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs"

Posted on April 20, 2009
Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) published a detailed opinion column in the New York Review of Books today, proposing "legislation to keep the courts open to suits filed against several major telephone companies that allegedly facilitated the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program...

Obama's Transparency Promise: We're Still Waiting

Posted on April 19, 2009
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 (FOIA), we welcomed it as a "particularly promising development...

US Government Rules that Use of Proxies Need Not Merit Extra Jail Time

Posted on April 17, 2009
Last month, the US Sentencing Commission considered new sentencing guidelines that would classify the use of proxy servers as "sophisticated means" when used in the commission of a crime, thus requiring extra prison time. EFF spoke out against these guidelines, sending Staff Technologist Seth Schoen to appear before the Commission to argue (PDF) that the use of anonymizing technologies is a widespread practice that requires no special knowledge or skills...

minilinks for 2009-02-17

Posted on April 17, 2009
Which Congressman Was Wiretapped?New reports that the NSA spied on a Congressman has people wondering which one it might be. Goldman Sachs v. BloggerGoldman Sachs is trying to silence a blogger that has criticized the bank. Lessons From the Privacy TrailA new book examines academic work on questions of privacy and identity in a networked society...

New Scholarship on Copyright Damages

Posted on April 16, 2009
We have often observed that one of the most pernicious aspects of U.S. copyright law is the outrageously disproportionate statutory damages an infringer may have to pay--from $750 to $150,000 per work, no matter how minimal the actual harm caused by the infringement...

Remembering First Amendment Champion Judith Krug

Posted on April 16, 2009
The free expression community lost a giant with the passing last weekend of Judith Krug, longtime director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom. Dating back to the late 1960s, Judith was one of the nation's fiercest defenders of the First Amendment, often provoking the ire of those who sought to remove material they didn't like ? for a variety of subjective (and usually narrow) reasons ? from the shelves of our libraries...

New Wiretapping Revelations Should Prompt New Action from Congress and the White House

Posted on April 16, 2009
The New York Times story with new revelations of surveillance abuses under the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program is making big news today (Associated Press, Washington Post, Salon,) as well it should. Beyond the allegations of an out-of-control spying program, the story casts new light on last spring's surveillance battle in Congress...

Stanford Law School Machinima Conference, April 24-25

Posted on April 15, 2009
The term "machinima" (machine + cinema) has been coined to describe movies made using video games. In addition to being an inspiring new "film" genre, it's also at the cutting edge of many important legal questions at the intersection of copyright, trademark, and contractual restrictions (i...

NY Times Reports New Revelations About Wiretapping Program

Posted on April 15, 2009
The New York Times reported today that the National Security Agency (NSA) "had been engaged in 'over-collection' of domestic communications of Americans," by which the NSA would spy on "groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority...

Jewel v. NSA Roundup: The Media on Obama's Position on State Secrecy and Warrantless Wiretapping

Posted on April 15, 2009
The Obama Administration?s shocking decision to assert Bush-era arguments in its motion to dismiss EFF?s case against the government for warrantless wiretapping, Jewel v. NSA, has been slowly working its way into the mainstream news. We?re still hoping for more coverage, but for now there are several examples of recent reporting that are worth pointing to...

Wanted: Your Stories of Disability Versus Copyright Law

Posted on April 15, 2009
In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th...

Boston College Campus Police: "Using Prompt Commands" May Be a Sign of Criminal Activity

Posted on April 14, 2009
On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay...

Computer Science Student Targeted for Criminal Investigation for Allegedly Sending Email

Posted on April 13, 2009
Boston - A Boston College computer science student has asked a Massachusetts court to quash an invalid search warrant for his dorm room that resulted in campus police illegally seizing several computers, an iPod, a cell phone, and other technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the student, who has petitioned the court for the immediate return of his property and is demanding that investigators be prohibited from any further searches or analysis of his digital data...

minilinks for 2009-04-10

Posted on April 10, 2009
Social Network Sites "Monitored" in UKThe UK government proposed rules that would allow the use of social networking sites to monitor criminal activity. Freedom on the NetFreedom House takes a comprehensive look at government tactics for controlling communications around the world...

Federal Authority Over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Posted on April 10, 2009
There's a new bill working its way through Congress that is cause for some alarm: the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF summary here), introduced by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (D-ME). The bill as it exists now risks giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most...

The Return of Line Noise: National Security Letters, Three Strikes Laws, and Warrantless Wiretapping

Posted on April 09, 2009
Tim Jones talks with Richard Esguerra about national security letters, with Danny O'Brien about "three-strikes" laws, and with Kevin Bankston about new developments in EFF's warrantless wiretapping litigation. read more

Keith Olbermann on Obama and Wiretapping

Posted on April 08, 2009
Last night, Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC had excellent coverage of and commentary on the Obama DOJ's radical new arguments in Jewel v. NSA, the EFF's lawsuit against the NSA for illegal surveillance. Here are the videos: Olbermann's second guest, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, aptly summarizes why the new ruling is so disappointing: "I think right now, the Bush people are bringing out their mission-accomplished sign, because they've not only gotten Obama to protect Bush and Cheney and others from any criminal investigation on torture, but he's now gone even further than they did in the protection of unlawful surveillance...

EFF's Kevin Bankston on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann"

Posted on April 08, 2009
Wednesday evening, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston was a guest on Countdown With Keith Olbermann. He spoke about the Obama Justice Department's recent disappointing arguments in Jewel v NSA. Also notable was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's appearance on the same program, in which she suggested that Congress consider reforming the "sovereign immunity" provisions of the Patriot Act...

Disability Access Activists Gather to Protest Kindle DRM

Posted on April 08, 2009
Yesterday, hundreds of people gathered in front of the headquarters of The Authors Guild in New York City to protest the removal of text-to-speech capabilities in Amazon's new Kindle 2 ebook device. You may remember a few months ago, when The Authors Guild claimed (falsely) that the text-to-speech feature violated copyright law, and forced Amazon to disable it...

Michigan Rep. Calls for RFID Review

Posted on April 07, 2009
Why is Michigan set to issue new Enhanced Drivers' Licenses (EDLs) that include long-range RFID (Radio Frequency ID) technology? That's the question that Michigan Rep. Paul Opsommer wants answered. Michigan entering into a federal agreement to put unencrypted, long range RFID computer chips into our driver's licenses presents a huge privacy risk with very little benefit...

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