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The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF,...
If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity...
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available When you pay for federally funded research, you should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (S.779, H.R.1477), which was just passed out of a major Senate committee. Under...
Imagine this: a limited liability company (LLC) is formed, for the sole purpose of acquiring patents, including what are likely to be low-quality patents of suspect validity. Patents in hand, the LLC starts approaching high-tech companies and demanding licensing fees. If they don’t get paid, the...
Copyright maximalists just don’t know when to stop. Having failed in their 2020 attempt to use U.S. law to force GitHub to permanently cut off access to youtube-dl, an open source tool that allows users to download and preserve videos, on the theory that the tool can also be used for infringing...
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of...
Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions...
Claiming that “right-wing voices are being censored,” Republican-led legislatures in Florida and Texas have introduced legislation to “end Big Tech censorship.” They’re right. Conservatives are being censored. But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants.
We trust companies with our information every day. But many companies—even those that hold our most revealing information—are using it not just to provide the services we ask for, but to amp up their profits at the cost of our privacy.That's why EFF has joined a campaign, led by the U.S. Public...
In their effort to prevent states from protecting a free and open Internet, a small handful of massive and extraordinarily profitably Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling state legislatures that network neutrality would hinder their ability to raise revenues to pay for upgrades and thus...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed new rules that would effectively end the public’s ability to challenge improperly granted patents at the Patent Office itself. We need EFF supporters to file public comments opposing these rules this week. The USPTO is moving quickly, and staying silent will…
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...
When The Great Gatsby rolls out to theaters across the country this weekend, it will bring to the screen a story familiar to millions from a literary classic that's often dubbed the proverbial "Great American Novel." Here’s what many folks don’t know: even though the book was published nearly 90...
Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom, used his nearly 20-year-old PayPal account to put his money where his mouth is. His primary use of the payment system was to fund servers to run Tor nodes, routing internet traffic in order to safeguard privacy and avoid country-level...
In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...
After years of secret trade negotiations over the future of intellectual property rights (and limits on those rights), the public gets a chance to looks at the results. For those of us who care about free speech and a balanced intellectual property system that encourages innovation, creativity, and...
Here at EFF, we see a lot of stupid patents. There was the patent on “scan to email.” And the patent on “bilateral and multilateral decision making.” There are so many stupid patents that Mark Cuban endowed a chair at EFF dedicated to eliminating them. We wish we could catalog them all, but with...
San Francisco - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) invalidated key claims in the so-called “podcasting patent” today after a petition for review from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—a decision that significantly curtails the ability of a patent troll to threaten podcasters big...
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this...
Each year, EFF’s Who Has Your Back campaign assesses the policies and practices of major Internet companies as a way to encourage and incentivize those companies to take a stand for their users in the face of government demands for data. Normally, when a company demonstrates it has a policy or...
With the new Safari 11 update, Apple takes an important step to protect your privacy, specifically how your browsing habits are tracked and shared with parties other than the sites you visit. In response, Apple is getting criticized by the advertising industry for "destroying the Internet's...
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of…
"youtube-dl" is a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub recently took down youtube-dl’s code repository at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America, potentially stopping many thousands of users, and other...
In 2021, San Mateo County, California, banned people incarcerated in county jails from receiving physical mail. Instead, family and friends were required to mail their letters to Smart Communications, a private for-profit company based in Florida that would scan and destroy those letters so that...
EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work. At the moment, the anti-circumvention prohibition in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably restricts vehicle...
Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today (paywalled, but summarized here) relies on all-too-familiar refrains to explain the dubious principles and so-called “facts” behind Facebook’s business model. It’s the same old song we’ve heard before. And, as usual, it wildly misses users’...
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal judge to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites. Power Ventures makes a web-...
Sebastian Tomczak blogs about technology and sound, and has a YouTube channel. In 2015, Tomczak uploaded a ten-hour video of white noise. Colloquially, white noise is persistent background noise that can be soothing or that you don’t even notice after a while. More technically, white noise is many...
Trade negotiators from the U.S. and its 11 Pacific Rim partners announced their agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) today, concluding the final round of closed negotiations in Atlanta and marking the culmination of seven years of secrecy. Throughout all that time, the U.S....
Did you know that anything created by federal government employees, under American law, can’t be copyrighted? They go right into the public domain. That means it’s impossible for there to be any copyright infringement on, say, a report by the Special Counsel on the investigation into the President...