EFF established that computer code is speech and shielded the developers of privacy-protecting software from government censorship.
EFF defended the right of innovators to build new technologies without begging Hollywood's permission first.
Fighting the abuse of copyright law to stifle competition, EFF helped Skylink score an important victory in the Federal Circuit that puts much-needed limits on the controversial "anti-circumvention" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
EFF helped defend a printer cartridge company against a competitor's overreaching copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The FBI arrested Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov while he was attending a security conference in Las Vegas to discuss the Advanced eBook Processor, a program to decrypt Adobe eBook files. This made Sklyarov the first person to be criminally charged under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Adobe initially pressed the case, but, after meeting with EFF, called for all charges against Sklyarov to be dropped.
Major motion picture studies filed a copyright infringement suit against two companies that made and distributed copies of movies with sexual and violent content removed. EFF protected innovation and fair use by defending "intermediate" copying.
Standing up for the public's right to make legal, fair uses of copyrighted material, EFF successfully defended the creators of a parody flash animation piece using Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" - and uncovered evidence that the classic folk song is in fact already part of the public domain.
Fighting the over-reach of trademark law, EFF signed on as co-counsel to a small travel services company, JSL, after credit card giant Visa convinced a federal court in Las Vegas to prevent the company from using the domain name "evisa.com".
EFF Helped Replay TV owners stand up to Hollywood to defend digital VCRs.
Trademark law at its heart is intended to protect consumers from confusion -- for example by preventing Pepsi from passing off its cola as Coca-Cola. Increasingly however trademark owners are trying to use their trademarks in ways that actually harm consumers by restricting their access to information from and about competitors.
EFF helped preserve the legal protections for actually private websites while protecting your right to read public websites.
In September of 2011, an astrology software company called Astrolabe filed suit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, researchers who coordinated the development of a time zone database.
EFF established that the FCC and Hollywood don't control your TiVo - you do.
Ditto.com (formerly known as Arriba Soft) was an early image search engine similar to Google's Image Search. So for example by entering "sailboat" into the Ditto website the searcher would be shown a selection of images of sailboats from around the Web.
EFF protected website owners free speech rights against overreaching trademark claims.
In a legal battle over Internet music storage that could impact innovation and free expression on the Internet EFF Public Knowledge and other public interest groups asked a federal judge in an amicus brief to protect the "safe harbor" rules for online content in EMI v. MP3Tunes.
EFF, together with Durie Tangri LLP, is defending a photo hobbyist against an outrageous patent suit from a company that claims to hold the rights to online competitions on social networks where users vote for the winner.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limits the circumvention of software that's designed to restrict access to copyrighted works. Unfortunately, such a blanket restriction can chill competition, free speech, and fair use. In an attempt to mitigate those harms, every three years the U.S.
Garcia v. Google, Inc. is a copyright case in which the Ninth Circuit has ordered Google to remove copies of the notorious "Innocence of Muslims" film from YouTube. Why? Because one of the actors in the film insists she has a copyright interest in her performance and, based on that interest, claims to have a right to have the video taken offline.
In this case, EFF backed Internet service providers (ISPs) in an effort to quash subpoenas issued in a predatory lawsuit over the alleged illegal downloading of adult material. The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the ACLU of the Nation’s Capitol joined EFF in the amicus brief, arguing that AF Holdings unfairly sued more than a thousand unnamed Internet users in the District of Co
EFF joined the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries in an amicus brief urging a federal court to find that the fair use doctrine permitted the creation of a valuable digital library, the HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL).
Note: There are two parts for the case page for Authors Guild v. Google. Part I discusses the proposed class action settlement. This part II discusses the fair use proceedings that followed the court's rejection of the proposed settlement.
In recent years, we’ve experienced an explosion of litigation surrounding § 101 of the Patent Act. That section is intended to preclude patent protection for laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. This is fundamental to the patent bargain.
Blue Spike v. Audible Magic is a patent case in which EFF intervened in order to achieve greater public access to the proceedings.
EFF set one of the first precedents protecting computer communications from unwarranted government invasion.
EFF extended free speech protections online, successfully challenging the constitutionality of Internet censorship laws.
EFF defended the free speech rights of a website publisher who had repeatedly received baseless threats from the corporate owners of Barney the Dinosaur. The Lyons Partnership wrongly claimed that Dr. Stuart Frankel's online parody of Barney violated copyright and trademark laws.
EFF successfully blocked a brazen attempt to unmask the identities of anonymous members of an online discussion group for embroidery fans.
EFF helped protect free speech rights of users who provide online forums for the views of others. In this case, a breast implant awareness activist was sued for defamation in part for re-posting an article written by someone else.
EFF protected anonymous speech and fought off a controversial self-help group's abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
EFF protected online speakers by bringing the first successful suit against abusive copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
EFF defended the free speech and fair use rights of an online newsletter publisher after the world's third largest pharmaceutical company that accused him of trademark infringement and cybersquatting.
The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA), a mouthpiece of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), sued dozens of people in venues across the country and around the world for publishing DeCSS, software code that decrypts the data on commercial DVDs. EFF represented Andrew Bunner and Mathew Pavlovich to defend First Amendment rights in technically oriented speech, to fight the misuse of trade secret law, and to clarify the rules on jurisdiction.
When former Intel employee Ken Hamidi sent email messages to Intel employees complaining about the company's allegedly unfair labor practices, Intel brought suit. EFF stepped in to protect Hamidi's First Amendment rights, arguing in a friend-of-the-court brief that there was no evidence to suggest that his email had threatened the integrity of Intel's systems.
EFF fought for open, transparent governance of the domain name system.
EFF helped convince the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate a dangerous patent law precedent that threatened free speech and consumers' rights.
EFF fought for bloggers' rights, defending the anonymity of an online speaker. In two messages from September of 2004, someone writing under the alias Proud Citizen criticized Patrick Cahill, a member of the Smyrna Town Council in Delaware.
EFF defended anonymous online speakers from frivolous subpoenas.
After EFF intervened in the case, an Oklahoma school superintendent dropped his attempt to unmask the identities of a website operator and all registered users of an Internet message board devoted to discussion of local public schools.
John Doe is an anonymous poster to two Internet message boards who made two statements critical of a publicly-traded company run by Plaintiff Cullens. In an effort to prevent Doe from further posting his opinions about the company on the Internet Cullens filed a libel suit against Doe in Illinois and asked a California court to force disclosure of Doe's identity.
EFF and the ACLU of Northern California filed suit in federal court on January 14, 2009 to protect the privacy and free speech rights of two San Francisco Bay Area community organizations after the groups' computers were seized and the data copied by federal and local law enforcement.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found a Florida man’s constitutional rights were violated when he was imprisoned for refusing to decrypt data on several devices. This was the first time an appellate court has ruled the 5th Amendment protects forced decryption – a major victory for constitutional rights in the digital age. EFF filed an amicus brief in this case.
In 2012, EFF used CDA 230 to end a legal threat to a lawyer ratings web site (LawyerRatingz.com) for postings by third parties.
In March 2010, EFF filed an amicus brief urging the Illinois Court of Appeals to protect the identity of an anonymous critic who upset a local politician.
EFF filed an amicus brief in this case in support of a man who was indicted under the a federal anti-stalking statute for repeatedly tweeting caustic criticisms of a public figure, a Buddhist sect leader who herself made extensive use of social media.
In February 2008, Swiss bank Julius Baer filed suit in federal district court against Wikileaks for hosting 14 allegedly leaked documents regarding personal banking transactions of Julius Baer customers. EFF, the ACLU and the ACLU of Northern California moved to intervene in the lawsuit.
Democratic Underground -- represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and attorney Chad Bowers -- was sued by Righthaven LLC on August 10 for a five-sentence excerpt of a Las Vegas Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, with a link back to the Review-Journal website.
A criminal justice blog that provides resources for difficult-to-prosecute murder cases is fighting bogus infringement claims from copyright troll Righthaven LLC.
EFF the Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) and Public Citizen have urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to consider the critical First Amendment questions at issue in a case asserting "hot news misappropriation" -- a doctrine that a federal court used to put time limit restrictions on the reporting of facts.
EFF defended online journalists and their rights to protect the confidentiality of sources as offline reporters do.
EFF filed an amicus in support of a John Doe who was denied attorneys fees under the California SLAPP law. The case was handled by the Stanford cyberlaw clinic. The appeals court agreed with Stanford and EFF and reversed the lower court ruling.
The ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and EFF filed a federal class-action lawsuit to block implementation of unconstitutional provisions of Proposition 35 – a ballot measure passed by California voters that restricts the legal and constitutionally protected speech of all registered sex offenders in California.
EFF and EarthRights International (ERI) are fighting to quash subpoenas issued by Chevron Corporation to three email providers (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft) demanding identifying information about the users of more than 100 email accounts, including environmental activists, journalists, and attorneys.
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 user had lawfully obtained.
EFF fought the government's attempts to track the location of a mobile phone user without sufficient evidence.
To protect your privacy, EFF supported the prosecution of an email provider who illegally copied his customers' incoming mail to his own email account.
EFF handled this leading case with the ACLU of Washington State. In it a federal district court in the Eastern District of Washington held that the identities of 23 participants in an Infospace chatroom were protected from disclosure.
In January 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that Americans have constitutional protections against GPS surveillance by law enforcement, holding that GPS tracking is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment.
On June 13, 2007, the New Jersey Township of Manalapan filed a malpractice suit against its former attorney Stuart Moskovitz, alleging misconduct regarding the Township's purchase of polluted land in 2005. The decision to file suit was met by a lively debate in the regional press and among local bloggers.
A federal magistrate judge in San Jose, California denied a government request for historical cell site records, ordering the government to seek a search warrant for the information. The government appealed this order to U.S.
Defendant Aaron Graham was suspected in a series of armed robberies around Baltimore. Without a warrant, police obtained 221 days of historical cell site location information about Graham from Sprint. On appeal before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, EFF joined the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in an amicus brief, arguing police need a search warrant to obtain historical cell site records from a cell phone provider.
In this criminal case, the government installed a pole camera overlooking a defendant's front yard and secretly recorded for more than a month.
EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology ("CDT") have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on warrantless searches of cell phones, arguing in two cases before the court that changing technology demands new guidelines for when the data on someone’s phone can be accessed and reviewed by investigators.
Along with EFF-Austin, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the ACLU of Texas, EFF urged the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to rule that a person has an expectation of privacy in the contents of their cell phone even when the phone is out of their control or custody.
EFF filed an amicus brief with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, asking it to rule police must get a search warrant in order to access historical cell site information. We argued that as cell phones and especially smartphones become prevalent, and the number of cell towers and cell sites increases, the location information revealed by cell sites becomes more precise.
EFF urged the Washington State Supreme Court to recognize that text messages are “the 21st Century phone call” and require that law enforcement obtain a warrant before reading texts on someone’s phone.
EFF urged the high court of Massachusetts to protect the rights of passengers in cars that law enforcement are tracking with GPS surveillance technology, arguing that both the driver and the passenger of a car have legal standing to challenge the collection of sensitive location data gathered by the GPS devices.
In May 2011, EFF partnered with the ACLU and the ACLU of Vermont to urge the Vermont Supreme Court to authorize courts to impose limitations on the police's ability to search computers and other forms of electronic evidence.
The California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), S.B. 178, requires state law enforcement to get a warrant before they can access electronic information about who we are, where we go, who we know, and what we do.
EFF and other civil liberties groups filed an amicus brief in Warshak v. United States urging the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hold that the government's seizure of email without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and federal privacy statutes as well as the Justice Department's own surveillance manual.
For almost 10 years, federal and local law enforcement agencies across the country have engaged in a massive and secretive telephone surveillance program known as “Hemisphere.” In July 2015, EFF had enough with the secrecy. We filed two separate lawsuits to force law enforcement agencies to release important information that would contribute to the public debate about the efficacy and legitimacy of the program.
