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Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims. When software security company Kaspersky Lab refused to surrender, Lodsys settled for nothing (yes, you read that right—absolutely nothing) rather than take its claims to trial. First,...
SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal Foundation will receive the 2023 EFF Awards for their vital work in helping to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all...
The Transportation Security Administration has set out an alarming vision of pervasive biometric surveillance at airports, which cuts against the right to privacy, the “right to travel,” and the right to anonymous association with others.The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, which included language...
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now...
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important...
EFF recently won our challenge to invalidate claims of the “podcasting patent” using a procedure at the Patent Office called inter partes review. This procedure allowed us to challenge a patent that was being used to demand licenses from individual podcasters, even though EFF itself had never been...
Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site...
Back in November, T-Mobile announced a new service for its mobile customers called Binge On, in which video streams from certain websites don’t count against customers’ data caps.[fn]To be fair, T-Mobile’s plans don’t have traditional data caps—they just slow down to “2G” speeds once customers...
Like most people, we at EFF are horrified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Also like most people, we are not experts on military strategy or international diplomacy. But we do have some expertise with the internet and civil liberties, which is why we are deeply concerned that governments around the...
San Francisco - America's broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus "Notch...
Dear member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Advisory Committee, You may have heard that over the past year we've been trying to insert legal safeguards into the Encrypted Media Extensions project at the W3C, which standardizes streaming video DRM. We've previously been opposed to the W3C...
UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning. “People deserve the right to a better process.”Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of...
Patent reform is heating up in Congress. Today House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte released a second discussion draft aimed at preventing abusive patent troll litigation. Chairman Goodlatte has suggested he will move quickly to hold a hearing and committee vote on this legislation....
Facebook claims its practice of forcing users to go by their "real names" (or "authentic identities" as Facebook spins it) makes the social network a safer place. In fact, the company has often claimed that the policy protects women who use the social media platform, even when faced with community...
Google has rolled out "Privacy Sandbox," a Chrome feature first announced back in 2019 that, among other things, exchanges third-party cookies—the most common form of tracking technology—for what the company is now calling "Topics." Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed...
When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. And the evidence is in that it conclusively makes broadband more expensive. A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries...
Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found.Our review of...
In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy. Worse, the boundaries between corporate surveillance and government...
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy...
As the popularity of Bitcoins has increased, government officials are concerned about criminal activity associated with the virtual currency. But a recent subpoena issued by the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs to 19-year-old Bitcoin developer and MIT student Jeremy Rubin goes too far, and...
The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from...
The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they...
Defenders of the NSA's mass spying have lost an important talking point: that the erosion of our privacy and associational rights is justified given the focus of surveillance efforts on combating terrorism and protecting the national security. That argument has always been dubious for a number of...
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) last week released a new report that supports what EFF has long suspected: that the FBI’s legal fight with Apple in 2016 to create backdoor access to a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone was more focused on creating legal precedent than...
At EFF, we think people ought to be able to understand how their devices work and repair them without asking permission of the manufacturer. We also think independent repair companies should to be able to compete with manufacturers in the aftermarket. Simply put, you should be able to fix your...
The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face...
New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States' already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono...
It would give the powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don't like, with President Trump himself saying that he would use the law to censor his critics. The bill passed the Senate in February, and it now heads to the president's desk.
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make...
Section 702 is the controversial and much-abused mass surveillance authority that expires in December unless Congress renews it. EFF and others have been working hard to get real reforms into the law and have opposed a renewal, and now, we’re hearing about a rushed attempt to tie renewal to funding...