You may remember that last year in Oakland, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors held a packed public hearing where members of the community, joined by EFF and ACLU of Northern California, testified for over three hours about worries around Sheriff Greg Ahern’s plan to obtain a drone. The consensus at the hearing was clear—at the hearing, only one attendee spoke in favor of the acquisition.

The lawsuit filed last week by music publishers BMG and Round Hill against Cox Communications could be the next battle in the major media companies’ long-term campaign to turn Internet service providers into copyright police. BMG and Round Hill are asking a federal court to declare that ISPs like Cox must terminate their customers’ accounts whenever the publishers’ agent—a company called Rightscorp—says so. Because Cox didn’t immediately kick subscribers off of its service after Rightscorp accused those subscribers  of copyright infringement, BMG and Round Hill say that Cox should pay potentially millions of dollars in penalties.

EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.

More about those proposals will be coming in a series of updates this week. But first, why are we at WIPO at all? Here's a short history lesson to explain.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been working towards the development of a Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations since 1998; about three times as long as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have taken so far, but with far less to show for it. Part of the reason for the delay has been a fundamental lack of clarity about what the whole exercise is actually about.

I’m excited to announce the start of this year’s Power Up Your Donation campaign! Until the end of Friday, donations to EFF through the campaign will be matched, meaning every gift has double the impact on digital rights. The matching funds for this campaign come from passionate supporters who banded together to provide Power Up challenge grants totaling $89,000. Please donate today and help us reach our goal!

As many privacy advocates have pointed out recently, it looks like some people in the federal government are intent on reviving the failed Crypto Wars of the 90s. And despite recent assurances, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) still hasn’t done enough to address NSA’s involvement in the creation of encryption standards. Fortunately, some lawmakers are taking security seriously.

This statement was drafted with SMEX, Global Voices, and individual actors. The original post can be found here.

Today, on Human Rights Day, we remind the world of our many friends who have broken the silence of oppression by expressing their thoughts, asking questions, and thinking critically and constructively about how to solve the problems before them.

Telling users how to strip the DRM from their legally purchased ebooks is not contributory copyright infringement, according to a ruling last month by a federal judge in New York. Judge Denise Cote dismissed two publishers' claims of contributory infringement and inducement in Abbey House Media v. Apple Inc., one of the many cases to come out of the antitrust litigation against Apple and a handful of major publishers.

How many times have you logged into a computer or website with someone else’s name and password—maybe to retrieve information for a spouse or a friend—completely with their permission?  Can you imagine spending a year in prison for that? It sounds ridiculous. That’s why EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief in United States v. Nosal this week urging the Ninth Circuit to overturn a troubling conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Update: On December 15, Judge Edward Shea issued his written opinion in United States v. Vargas, which you can read here.

The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the frontyard of someone's home without a search warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. 

A panel of eleven Ninth Circuit federal judges will hear oral arguments Monday in a rehearing of Garcia v. Google, a copyright case arising from the notorious "Innocence of Muslims" video that was associated with violent protests around the world. The appellant, Cindy Lee Garcia, argues that she holds a copyright in her five-second performance in the video, and because she was tricked into participating, that the video uses that performance without permission. EFF and many other public interest groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, noting (among other concerns) that it is a matter of firmly established law that actors generally do not have a copyright in their performances.

On Wednesday of last week, the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015 passed in the US House of Representatives. The bill, H.R. 4681, contains Section 309, which imposes guidelines for when the intelligence community can keep some communications collected under Executive Order 12333 (EO 12333). President Reagan wrote the policy document in the 1980s to provide the framework for intelligence agency conduct. Today, it is used to justify mass surveillance of communications.

A panel of eleven Ninth Circuit federal judges heard oral arguments yesterday in Garcia v. Google, a copyright case arising from the notorious "Innocence of Muslims" video that was associated with violent protests around the world. The appellant, Cindy Lee Garcia, argues that she holds a copyright in her five-second performance in the video (a performance she says was tricked into giving), and is trying to use that claim to get the video pulled off the internet. To the shock of many, last February two Ninth Circuit judges agreed she might have a claim and ordered Google to remove the video from YouTube and prevent future uploads. Yesterday’s hearing revisited the facts and law that led to that decision. 

There are many reasons software patents cause so much trouble. The Patent Office does not do a good job reviewing software patent applications to see if they are claiming something new. And these patents often describe the purported invention with highly vague and ambiguous language. Software patents also tend to claim every way to solve a problem, rather than the particular solution developed by the applicant. This is known as functional claiming. While it may seem like an arcane legal dispute, functional claiming is a key feature of overbroad software patents.

Almost three years ago, millions of Internet users joined together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a disastrous bill that would have balkanized the Internet in the name of copyright and trademark enforcement. Over the past week, we've been tracking a host of revelations about an insidious campaign to accomplish the goals of SOPA by other means. The latest development: Google has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block enforcement of an overbroad and punitive subpoena seeking an extraordinary quantity of information about the company and its users. The subpoena, Google warns, is based on legal theories that could have disastrous consequences for the open Internet.

At the start of 2014, the fear among privacy activists around the world was not that surveillance would be ignored as an issue. After six months of relentless revelations from the Snowden cache, how could it? Instead, they were concerned that mass surveillance would be normalized. Numbed by the relentless list of privacy violations conducted by the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence services, would Internet users eventually just throw up their hands, and accept that the price of a global communications system was the end of privacy?

At the end of each year, EFF puts together a list of some of the interesting and noteworthy books that have been published in the past 12 months or so. We don't endorse all of their arguments, but we find they've added some valuable insight to the conversation around the areas and issues on which we work. This year, we've included two movies as well—both highly-regarded documentaries that have introduced many people to very important issues.

Some notes about this list: it's presented in alphabetical order by author's last name, and most links contain our Amazon affiliate code, which means EFF will receive a portion of purchases made through this page. Descriptions are by Parker Higgins except where otherwise specified.

"Dragnet Nation" by Julia Angwin

If you’ve been watching the issue of net neutrality this year, you know it’s been quite a ride. The year started with the D.C. Circuit overturning the majority of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet rules, explaining that the FCC can’t impose “common carrier”-type rules on ISPs without actually classifying them as “common carriers.” Having chosen to classify them instead as “information services” back in 2004, the ruling meant the FCC had to go back to the drawing board.

At the close of 2013, we made a wish for the upcoming year: With revelations of the NSA's unlawful and unjust data interception programs

Copyright law remains just as broken in 2014 as it was in 2013, but some countries have been tinkering around the edges of copyright this year in an attempt to address its flaws.

The United Kingdom stands out as a country where the need for copyright reform has been comprehensively studied over the past decade, and where a number of key recommendations of the most recent study—for once—were not shelved, but actually found their way into the law books. These included provisions facilitating the use of copyright works by students, researchers, teachers, libraries and the disabled.

In the midst of the global surveillance debate, talk of online censorship has often taken a backseat. Yet, all around the world, the inalienable right to freedom of expression is violated on a regular basis. While in 2014, issues such as terrorism and online harassment generated new discussions of speech rights, censorship of political and religious speech—as well as “obscenity” and content deemed a risk to “national security”—remains all too common.

“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol