Copyright trolls are nothing new, and Righthaven is just the latest group of lawyers to try to turn copyright litigation into a business model. What these lawyers have in common is that they seek to take advantage of copyright's draconian damages in order to bully Internet users into forking over money. To anyone who has watched the file-sharing lawsuit […]

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of public interest groups and law professors have asked a California appeals court to protect craigslist from a lawsuit that could spur websites to be less helpful in responding to complaints about user behavior. In Scott P. v. craigslist, Inc., the plaintiff complained about a series o […]

Scary news from California's Contra Costa County  school officials there have reportedly decided to track some preschoolers with RFID chips, thanks to a federal grant supplying the funding. According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children's mov […]

Hari Prasad, the Indian security researcher arrested for allegedly stealing an electronic voting machine, has been released on bail. Earlier this year, an anonymous source gave the machine to Prasad and a team of researchers, who discovered critical security flaws. Under questioning by authorities last weekend, Prasad refused to divulge the identity of the s […]

Just a few weeks after his interview with EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn, American hero Stephen Colbert has returned to the subject of digital rights. And in his show on Tuesday, he came up with a great solution to the problem of privacy and online social networks: Control-Self-Delete. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Word - Control-Self-De […]

Facebook is facing down another embarrassing episode of censorship this week after refusing to show ads submitted by the Just Say Now marijuana legalization campaign. The gag is an important reminder that social networks like Facebook  while useful, interesting, and pretty  are "walled gardens" with overseers whose interests can overwrite free sp […]

Music lovers take note: the classical music archive Musopen needs your help to liberate some classic symphonies from copyright entanglement. Museopen is looking to solve a difficult problem: while symphonies written by Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky are in the public domain, many modern arrangements and sound recordings of those works are copyr […]

We're pleased to announce that EFF's Legal Director, Cindy Cohn, has won a 2010 Intellectual Property Institute Vanguard Award from the State Bar of California. Cindy was one of four legal professionals honored for spearheading new developments in the world of intellectual property. We're proud to see the work that we do to preserve balance in […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to assist defendants in the Righthaven copyright troll lawsuits. Righthaven, founded in March of 2010, files hundreds of copyright infringement lawsuits on behalf of newspaper publishers against bloggers who make use of news content without permission. To that end, Righthaven searches the internet for stories and […]

Good news in the fight against bad software patents: a jury in the Eastern District of Texas recently found the Firepond/Polaris patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,411,947) invalid. This patent was on EFF's "Most Wanted" list, targeted because it claimed nothing more than a system using natural language processing to respond to customers' online i […]