Deeplinks
We wrote about a case last week that was deeply disturbing: a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a personal computer located inside their home. In this court’s view, the FBI is free to hack into networked devices (aka, pretty much everything) without a warrant.
Fortunately, this is only the opinion of a single district court judge, so it’s not controlling precedent throughout the country. But the decision makes one thing clear: we need to stop the changes to Rule 41, amendments that will make it easier for the government to get a warrant to remotely search computers.
A groundbreaking international agreement to address the “book famine” for blind and print-disabled people is now set to go into force after passing another key milestone today. The agreement requires countries to allow the reproduction and distribution of accessible ebooks by limiting the scope of copyright restrictions.
The Marrakesh agreement takes aim at the global shortage of ebooks available in suitable formats for the print disabled, which in some regions is as low as 1% of published books. At the time of its completion, only 57 of the 184 member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had copyright exceptions for this purpose, and inconsistencies between them made sharing books between countries nearly impossible.
How do you store your paper files? Perhaps you leave them scattered on your desk or piled on the floor. If you’re more organized, you might keep them in a cabinet. This month’s stupid patent, US Patent No. 6,690,400 (the ’400 patent), claims the idea of using “virtual cabinets” to graphically represent data storage and organization. While this is bad, the worse news is that the patent’s owner is suing just about anyone who runs a website.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court took away a little more of your right to be free from unlawful police searches. In a 5-3 decision in Utah v. Strieff, the Court held that if the police illegally stop and search you, they can use against you any evidence they find, as long as they determine—after they’ve stopped you—that you’re one of the 7.8 million Americans with an outstanding arrest warrant.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a fiery and spot-on dissent that forcefully demonstrates the troubling links between racial discrimination, police stops of pedestrians and motorists, arrest warrant databases, and out-of-control police surveillance technologies.
The Strieff Majority Undermined the Exclusionary Rule
The Supreme Court decided two patent cases and one copyright case this month. If the three cases have a unifying theme, it is that the Supreme Court gave more deference to fact-finding tribunals, whether that is the Patent Office or district courts. We discuss each of the three rulings below.
Halo Electronics v. Pulse Electronics
TL;DR: The Supreme Court gives district courts more discretion to impose enhanced damages in patent cases.
The best legal minds in the Bay Area gathered to participate in EFF's 9th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night on June 16. Over 100 friends from 20 technology law firms and Internet companies attended, making for a rousing night vying for the coveted Cyberlaw Quiz Cup. EFF's staff joined forces to craft questions, pulling details from the rich canon of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property law, creating seven rounds about privacy and speech, encryption case law, fair use in music, and more.
Competition was fierce this year, with the top four teams separated by just one point. The tiebreaker round involved very challenging questions, including one about a court decision published just hours earlier, in Capitol Records v. Vimeo.
On June 23, Amnesty International—along with IFEX, Human Rights Watch, FIDH, and seven other organizations—issued a joint statement on the “existential threat” faced by Egyptian civil society. In recent months, the statement reads:
Many people working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been detained and ill-treated, charged with offences under the draconian Counter-terrorism law, or subject to a judicial request to ban them from travel and freeze their assets.
As the debate over the future of the DMCA safe harbors heats up, the US Copyright Office is proposing a plan that could undermine those safe harbors much sooner.
One of the myriad conditions of DMCA safe harbor protection from copyright liability (protection on which thousands of intermediaries rely to survive) is to register an agent to receive DMCA takedown notices. Last month the Copyright Office announced that it would finally be implementing a new, much cheaper and streamlined electronic registration process.
But there’s a catch.
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