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Libel Case Could Chill Speech Online
Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case that could undermine a federal statute protecting the free speech of bloggers, Internet service providers, and other individuals who use the Internet to post content written by others. The case in question is a libel suit filed against women's health advocate Illena Rosenthal after she posted a controversial opinion piece on a Usenet news group. The piece was written not by Rosenthal, but by Tim Bolen, a critic of plaintiff Terry Polevoy. In their brief, EFF and the ACLU argue that Section 230 of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 protects Internet publishers from being held liable for allegedly harmful comments written by others. Similar attempts to eliminate the protections created by Section 230 have almost universally been rejected, until a California Court of Appeals radically reinterpreted the statute to allow lawsuits against non-authors. The case is being reviewed by the California Supreme Court...
Full Story, Amicus Brief [PDF], ACLU, Telecommunications Act of 1996
November 30, 2004

Court Blocks Movie Studios' Bulldozer Legal Strategy
Last week, members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed 11 lawsuits against hundreds of people they accused of using file-sharing networks to share infringing copies of movies. They sued groups of "Does" identified by numerical IP address and requested discovery of names from the users' ISPs. A Northern District of California judge found this bulldozer process improper, ordering the case to be put on hold for all but one of the defendants. Judge William Alsup ruled that because claims against the 12 defendants were unrelated, yoking the defendants together into one big case was improper. "Such joinder may be an attempt to circumvent the filing fees by grouping defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions but it could nonetheless appear improper under Rule 20," the order states. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed friend-of-the-court briefs objecting to similar misjoinder in many of the cases filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against alleged infringers...
Full Release, EFF's MPAA v. The People page
November 23, 2004

EFF, Verified Voting Push for Post-Election Tests on E-voting Machines
San Francisco - On November 2, voting machines in many states—both "red" and "blue"—had problems that led thousands of citizens to call a national voter protection hotline. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) were at the other end of the line, and the two organizations are very concerned about what they heard. In several states, voters who chose one presidential candidate were presented with confirmation screens that listed another candidate's name. In others, machines crashed and were rebooted repeatedly, but nobody knows whether votes were lost. EFF and VVF have responded by sending letters to voting officials in the eight counties that experienced the worst technical problems, urging the officials to allow independent testing of the machines. Such tests could reveal what went wrong and whether anyone tampered with the devices. Prominent technical experts including Rice University computer science professor Dan Wallach and security guru Bruce Schneier have agreed to help conduct these tests...
Full Release, VerifiedVoting.org
November 22, 2004

EFF Announces New Advisory Board
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proud to announce the formation of its first Advisory Board, a group of legal and technical experts who will assist in shaping long-term strategies and goals for the civil liberties organization. The Advisory Board will meet regularly with EFF staff and Executive Board members to offer guidance and outside perspectives. "EFF is thrilled to have such wonderful thinkers, activists, and community leaders joining us," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "We look forward to working with them and benefiting from their wisdom." Added EFF Executive Board Chairman Brad Templeton, "This is an exciting time in EFF's history. We're bigger than we've ever been, and we're able to take on many new cases and issues. I welcome the Advisory Board's help in shaping what EFF will become as we move forward..."
Full Release
November 22, 2004

EFF Fights for Justice at WIPO
Geneva - This week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will hold a committee meeting to debate the merits of its proposed "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be there to urge delegates to reject aspects of the treaty that would impoverish the public domain and thwart innovation. EFF European Affairs Coordinator Cory Doctorow will present a letter to the committee on behalf of 20 technology companies and organizations that oppose including new webcasters' rights in the treaty. "This coalition shatters the illusion that there is a technology consensus on this issue," said Doctorow. The new pseudo-copyright for webcasters would curtail the public's ability to archive news footage or re-use broadcast material that is in the public domain. It would also require that all media players be closed-source, proprietary, and subject to the oversight and approval of the movie studios. EFF is joining several other non-government organizations (NGOs) in proposing an alternative draft of the treaty -- one that targets the problem of signal theft rather than adds these new rights...
Full Release, EFF's DRM Paper [PDF], Alternative Treaty Draft, WIPO Meeting Details, WIPO Development Agenda
November 18, 2004

EFF Continues Push for Access to Secret Court Order
San Antonio, TX - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a reply brief in a federal court in Texas supporting its motion to unseal a secret court order. That order had led to the seizure of two servers hosting several websites and radio feeds belonging to Indymedia, a global collective of Independent Media Centers (IMCs) and thousands of journalists. EFF filed its reply after the United States Attorney's Office in San Antonio, Texas, filed an opposition brief urging the federal court to refuse EFF's request to unseal. The opposition brief argued that secrecy was required to protect "an ongoing criminal terrorist investigation" and that the confidentiality provisions of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) trumped the rights of Indymedia in this case...
Full Release, EFF's IndyMedia page, EFF Reply Brief [PDF], Text of the US-Italy MLAT
November 16, 2004

EFF Urges FCC Not to Mandate Surveillance Regime on Internet
Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) objecting to the agency's plan to expand the reach of a law that forces communications service providers to build surveillance backdoors into their networks. The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make wiretapping easier. It expressly did not regulate data traveling over the Internet. But earlier this year, law enforcement agencies petitioned the FCC to expand CALEA's reach to cover broadband providers so that it would be easier for law enforcement to tap Internet "phone calls" via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications such as Vonage, as well as online "conversations" using various kinds of instant messaging (IM) programs like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). The FCC responded with a "notice of proposed rulemaking" (NPRM), which proposes to introduce surveillance technology mandates to broadband Internet access and "managed" VoIP...
Full Release, EFF's CALEA page
November 12, 2004

EFF Files Brief in Support of Email Privacy
Boston, MA - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a case that could have a profound effect on the privacy of Internet communications. The brief argues that the decision in US v. Councilman, soon to be reheard by the full First Circuit, should be overturned. A panel of First Circuit judges previously ruled that it does not violate criminal wiretap laws when an email service provider monitors the content of users' incoming messages without their knowledge or consent. The defendant in the case, Bradford Councilman, is a bookseller who offered email service to his customers. Councilman configured the email processing software so that all incoming email sent to his customers from Amazon.com, a competitor, was secretly copied and sent to his personal email account before it arrived in the intended recipient's mailbox. The court ruled that this interception did not violate federal law, stating that "it may well be that the protections of the Wiretap Act have been eviscerated as technology advances..."
Full Release, EFF's US v. Councilman page
November 12, 2004

Anti-Spam Measures Block Free Speech
San Francisco - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a white paper describing the effects of anti-spam technologies on free speech. "Noncommercial Email Lists: Collateral Damage in the Fight Against Spam" focuses on how groups running noncommercial email lists are being harmed by anti-spam techniques. The paper grew out of EFF's efforts to help MoveOn.org, human rights groups, parents' groups, and others, deliver email messages in the face of barriers that are aimed at stopping spam but that also stop wanted messages. "When tools designed to prevent unwanted email also prevent wanted email from being delivered, or when anti-spam tools favor well-funded speakers over others, something fundamental to the health of Internet communication has been broken," write the authors of the paper, EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn and EFF Policy Analyst Annalee Newitz, in the introduction. The paper goes on to explain how anti-spam technologies, such as blocklists, server-side filtering, bonded sender programs, and email authentication schemes like Sender-ID and DomainKeys, are often misused...
Full Release, White Paper: "Collateral Damage"
November 12, 2004

EFF, Nonprofits Challenge Secret Government Blacklists
Washington, DC - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a dozen other nonprofit organizations in filing for an injunction from the US District Court in Washington, DC, to stop the federal government from requiring the charities to use blacklists in order to receive payroll donations from federal employees. The groups argue that the new requirement, which was implemented without any notice or public comment period, is not authorized by statute and violates the First and Fifth Amendments. The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) enables federal employees to contribute easily to their favorite nonprofit organizations through automatic payroll deductions. In 2003 alone, this program brought over $248 million to thousands of charities. Earlier this year, the government for the first time began requiring all organizations participating in the CFC to certify that they have screened every employee and expenditure against a series of blacklists created by the government on the basis of secret information. Charities that refuse to sign the certification cannot participate in the CFC, even if they meet all other requirements...
Full Release, ACLU v OPM Complaint [PDF]
November 10, 2004

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