Fields v. City of Philadelphia
Does the First Amendment guarantee the right of individuals to record police officers exercising their official duties in public? That is the question being considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in two consolidated cases: Fields v. City of Philadelphia and Geraci v. City of...
Mavrix Photographs v. Live Journal
The case involves LiveJournal, a social media platform that allows users to create “communities” based on a common theme or subject. The communities are partly managed by moderators, who review posts (including photos) that users submit to make sure they follow the rules for posting and commenting created by the...
SCA Hygiene v. First Quality Baby Products
This patent case raised the question of whether the defense of laches is available in patent litigation. Laches is a legal doctrine that says rightsholders can't sit on their rights. It protects defendants who are prejudiced by long delay (for example, by investing heavily in a product while the patent...
United States v. Gartenlaub
In January 2014, the FBI secretly entered Gartenlaub's home while he and his wife were on vacation in China. Agents scoured the home, taking pictures, searching through boxes and books, and—critically—making wholesale copies of Gartenlaub's hard drives. Agents were authorized by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ("FISC") to search...
Neal v. Fairfax County Police Department
EFF is urging the Supreme Court of Virginia to protect the state's residents from a police surveillance database created with automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Fairfax County Police Department uses ALPRs that read every license plate that goes by, and stores the records for up to a year. Harrison Neal’s...
TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods
TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods is a case that effectively asks the court to decide whether patent owners can sue in practically any corner of the country. The current law allows patent owners to pick and choose between federal courts, often opting for courts that are perceived to have rules...
Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International Inc.
In Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International Inc. , the Supreme Court issued an important ruling affirming your right to own the things you buy. The case involved the doctrine of “patent exhaustion,” which says that once a patent owner sells a product, it cannot later claim the product’s...
Blue Spike v. Audible Magic
Blue Spike v. Audible Magic is a patent case in which EFF intervened in order to achieve greater public access to the proceedings. In this case, Blue Spike accused Audible Magic of infringing various patents. The parties filed motions for summary judgment relating to various allegations made in the...
2016 Internet Archive NSL
In this case, the Internet Archive pushed back against a formerly secret national security letter (NSL). Represented by EFF, the Archive informed the FBI that it did not have the information the agency was seeking and pointed out that NSL included misinformation about how to contest the accompanying gag order...
MuckRock litigation
EFF helped online public records platform MuckRock successfully defend three lawsuits filed against it and one of its users over public records that allegedly contained trade secrets. This included vindicating MuckRock's First Amendment rights when a court repealed a previous order that required the platform to de-publish public records the...
Google v. Equustek
Google v Equustek involves a legal challenge to an extraterritorial order from a Canadian court. EFF intervened in the case after a trial court ruled in June that Google must remove links to full websites that contained pages selling a product that allegedly infringed trade secret rights. The injunction not...
Microsoft v. Department of Justice
Microsoft sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) in April 2016 challenging portions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that allow the government to serve a warrant on the company to get access to customers’ emails and other information stored on remote servers—all without telling users their data is being...
Green v. U.S. Department of Justice
Green v. Department of Justice is an EFF lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions on First Amendment grounds. These provisions, located in Section 1201(a) of the DMCA, restrict people’s ability to access, use, or even discuss copyrighted materials that they purchase,...
The Playpen Cases: Mass Hacking by U.S. Law Enforcement
In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. The site's actual IP address was publicly available and appeared to resolve to a location within the U.S. After some additional investigation, the FBI...
