When it comes to Facebook’s real names policy, it’s really clear—something needs to change. Over the last few weeks, we’ve joined dozens of advocates in saying so. And in a meeting with LGBTQ and digital rights advocates, Facebook agreed. Of course, admitting there’s a problem is always the first step towards a solution. But what’s not clear is what that solution will be.

Open Access Week is less than a month away! Now in its eighth year, Open Access Week is an international event that celebrates the wide-ranging benefits of enabling open access to information and research–as well as the dangerous costs of keeping knowledge locked behind publisher paywalls.

From October 20 to 26, academics, researchers, and curious minds everywhere will be encouraged to learn about the various hurdles to open knowledge and share stories of positive advancements in the effort to make open access the norm in scholarship and research.

Negotiators from across the Atlantic met this week in Chevy Chase, Maryland to continue discussing the terms of the EU-US trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This is the seventh round of secretive meetings, and not much is known about the exact issues that are on the negotiating table. However a press release issued today confirms that “intellectual property” (IP) rights were one of four areas given focus in this round of negotiations. Given how notoriously captured by corporate interests IP discussions in trade negotiations are, this has us very worried.

EFF has a long running-mission to Encrypt the Web. To make the Web more secure, more private, and more censorship-resistant, we need to completely replace the insecure HTTP protocol with HTTPS. That task saw some major progress last week, with the anouncement by CloudFlare that it will now make HTTPS free and available by default for the approximately two million sites that it serves.

"I could take down the internet with that, and so could you."

Dan Geer, Chief Information Security Officer of CIA’s venture capital arm, didn't mince words when he mentioned the security flaws in home routers during his keynote address at last month's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. But he also noted a small silver lining around the dark cloud of router security: people are starting to take the problem much more seriously. As he noted, the "SOHOpelessly Broken" DEFCON hacking contest, co-presented by Independent Security Evaluators and EFF, is drawing attention to security vulnerabilities in routers with the goal of helping to get them fixed.

After months of delay, Warner has finally released documents detailing its notice and takedown practices. The documents were filed under seal in the now-defunct Hotfile litigation until a federal court (prompted by a motion from EFF) ordered Warner to produce them for the public.

When you buy a device, you expect to own it. You expect to be able to open it up, mess with it, and improve it. At the very least, you expect it to continue to work for its intended purpose.

What you don't expect is that the manufacturer will remotely cause the device to stop functioning unless you agree to be bound by new legal terms governing your relationship with them.

With assistance from Marcia Hofmann

What if you picked up a cup of coffee on your way to work and paid $2.00 in cash, only to have the man behind the counter request your home address?

"My home address?" you might ask. 

"Yes," he might reply, "And your full legal name. I’m keeping it in a file for the next 10 years, just in case the government wants it."

Sound ridiculous? Substitute bitcoins for cash, and that’s what the New York regulators might like to see happen in the near future at businesses that accept digital currency.

Last night, New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Ben Lawksy gave a speech at the Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law in which he reportedly backed down from the threat of forcing software developers who innovate around Bitcoin to obtain licenses. According to Coindesk, Lawksy said: 

"To clarify, we do not intend to regulate software or software development. For example, a software developer who creates and provides wallet software to customers for their own use will not need a license. Those who are innovating and developing the latest platforms for digital currencies will not need a license."

Today Wikileaks published a new draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter. This draft text, from May 2014, gives us another look into the current state of negotiations over this plurilateral trade agreement’s copyright provisions since another draft was leaked last year. And what we’re seeing isn’t pretty. The TPP still contains text on DRM, ISP liability, copyright term lengths, and criminal enforcement measures, and introduces new provisions on trade secrets that have us worried.

Earlier this year, Randall Rader, then Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit, called a group of administrative patent judges “death squads.” What had these judges done to deserve such savage criticism? They had done exactly what Congress intended: found some bad patents invalid. This week EFF filed comments with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) supporting the work of its administrative trial judges and urging the agency to make review of issued patents as affordable and efficient as possible.

FBI Director James Comey gave a speech yesterday reiterating the FBI's nearly twenty-year-old talking points about why it wants to reduce the security in your devices, rather than help you increase it. Here's EFF's response:

Welcome to the eighth annual Open Access Week! We're joining an international community—researchers and students, doctors and patients, librarians and activists—to celebrate free and open access to knowledge. This is also a time to discuss the barriers and costs of keeping research and information locked up with restrictive licenses and publisher paywalls.

This week, we'll be blogging daily about various aspects of open access, as well as ways to get involved in the movement. Visit this page throughout the week to find a list of all our blog posts. If you have further questions, be sure to tune in on Thursday at 10 a.m. PT for a reddit AmA, where we’ll be joined by fellow advocates and researchers.

In the U.S., if the police come knocking at your door, the Constitution offers you some protection. But the Constitution is just a piece of paper—if you don’t know how to assert your rights. And even if you do assert your rights…what happens next? That answer may seem complicated, but protecting yourself is simple if you know your rights.

That’s why EFF has launched an updated Know Your Rights Guide that explains your legal rights when law enforcement try to search the data stored on your computer, cell phone, or other electronic device.

The guide clarifies when the police can search devices, describes what to do if police do (or don’t) have a warrant, and explains what happens if the police can’t get into a device because of encryption or other security measures. 

The progress of knowledge is fueled by people who dedicate their lives to a field—to read, examine, and absorb everything they can out of passionate intellectual curiosity. Diego Gomez is one of these individuals, and is dedicated to the conservation of reptiles and amphibians.

Millions of people use research everyday. From students, medical professionals, to curious hobbyists, we all benefit from being able to access, read, and cite reliable, tested information. But getting the research we need can be hard and costly when it's locked up behind expensive paywalls. Two university students, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, were finally fed up with being denied access to online journals and articles that were necessary to continue their studies—so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was Open Access Button, a browser-based tool that records users’ collisions with paywalls and aids them in finding freely accessible copies of those research articles. The previous version had over 5,000 users and mapped nearly 10,000 encounters with paywalled research.

The open access movement has historically focused on access to scholarly research, and understandably so. The knowledge commons should be shared with and used by the public, especially when the public helped create it.

But that commons includes more than academic research. Our cultural commons is broader than what is produced by academia. Rather it includes all of the information, knowledge, and learning that shape our world. And one crucial piece of that commons is the rules by which we live. In a democratic society, people must have an unrestricted right to read, share, and comment on the law. Full stop.

Laura Poitras’ riveting new documentary about mass surveillance gives an intimate look into the motivations that guided Edward Snowden, who sacrificed his career and risked his freedom to expose mass surveillance by the NSA. CITIZENFOUR, which debuts on Friday, has many scenes that explore the depths of government surveillance gone awry and the high-tension unfolding of Snowden’s rendezvous with journalists in Hong Kong. One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes when Snowden discusses his motivation for the disclosures and points to his fundamental belief in the power and promise of the Internet: 

Even the reports that are supposed to provide transparency about the FBI's use of national security lettters (NSLs) are secret—or at least a couple dozen pages of them are. NSLs are nonjudicial orders that allow the FBI to obtain information from companies, without a warrant, about their customers’ use of services. They almost always contain a gag order, which prohibits recipients from even saying they've received the request.

Two Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reports reviewing the FBI's use of NSLs from 2007 and 2008 were reissued earlier this week after having portions declassified. You can see the newly released versions of the 2007 report here and the 2008 report here.

This Open Access Week, we are celebrating and advocating for unfettered access to the results of research, a movement that has shown considerable progress over the last few decades. 

School districts across the country are grappling with how to deal with their students’ use of technology and social media. All too often, in an attempt to protect students, they end up implementing technology polices that give administrators too much power and go too far in restricting what students can do online. Williamson County Schools, a public school district in affluent Williamson County, Tennessee, is one such school district. Recently, a concerned parent, Daniel Pomerantz, brought the policy to the attention of EFF and the ACLU of Tennessee (ACLU-TN). Mr. Pomerantz was right to be concerned.

Lumen View is a typical patent troll. Armed with a vague patent on “facilitating bilateral and multilateral decision-making,” it sent out aggressive letters demanding payment. It refused to explain how its targets actually infringed its patent. Instead, it made shakedown offers it knew would be less than the cost of defending a lawsuit. When startup FindTheBest spoke up about Lumen View’s tactics, the troll asked for a gag order.

EFF proudly participated in the eighth annual Open Access Week last week, a celebration of making scholarly research immediately and freely available for people around the world to read, cite, and re-use.

We published multiple blog posts each day, including a post from our friends at Wikimedia and a letter from Colombian scientist, Diego Gomez, who is facing up to eight years in jail for sharing a scholarly article online. One theme that seemed to run across all blog posts was that open access doesn't exist in a vacuum: there are laws, policies, and happenings in the world that immensely affect our access to research. Copyright law, for example, not only bolsters the current closed access model of scholarship, but its particulars are becoming stricter as policies extend outside the United States. We encourage you to check out all the blog posts below.