The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with that logic and rejected the lawsuit (see this recap of its ruling by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in support of Cablevision); when the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal, that ended the case. Now Cablevision is free to roll out this feature--and, more importantly, other companies can experiment with other video-recoding services that rely on network storage.

Tim Jones, manager of activism and technology for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said "there is a stronger expectation of privacy when you're dealing with the government rather than ordering a pizza online . . . . This is an opportunity for government to create new technology."

In any event, we left the office Thursday of last week feeling uneasy; we just didn’t understand how or why someone could get hit so hard for illegally downloading two dozen songs. With that in mind, we went back and checked in with Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation out in San Francisco, to bring us up to speed.

“The real core question is, is this a fair use or not?” said Corynne McSherry, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “Frankly the answer is, we don’t know.” Ms. McSherry suggests playing it safe and always asking.

"This is a profound question about our identity and our place in society," Peter Eckersley said Wednesday from San Francisco. He's a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He studies privacy issues brought on by rapidly advancing technologies.

"Do we," he asked, "have the right to say, 'Hey I want to escape the life I was living? I want to be a new person in a new place.' "

Now the EFF appears to be looking to get its hands on a copy of the equivalent manual for the FBI—the agency's Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines, which details the rules of the road for FBI-run domestic surveillance. The only problem is that its contents are a secret. So, the EFF is filing suit to have the manual's contents released to the public.

Ten years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?

“The Attorney General’s Guidelines are troubling, allowing for open investigative ‘assessments’ of any American without factual basis or reasonable suspicion,” EFF lawyer David Sobel said in a statement. “The withholding of the Operational Guidelines compounds our concerns. Americans have the right to know the basic surveillance policies used by federal investigators and how their privacy is — or is not — being protected.”

"Americans have the right to know the basic surveillance policies used by federal investigators and how their privacy is -- or is not -- being protected," EFF senior counsel David Sobel said.

Some privacy advocates are wary of how electronic medical records will be used. Lee Tien, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, agrees that patients should have more access to their records, but not at the expense of security.

"Most of these curriculums paint the copyright issue in a very singular way and talk about it as something that only benefits the industries," said Richard Esguerra, an activist for EFF, which champions the public interest in digital-rights issues. "Copyright infringement is a real issue, but there's also a 'know your rights' angle and a right way to use copyrighted materials" legally.

The Times even recalls a widely publicized case five years ago in which Apple attempted to subpoenaed AppleInsider's Kasper Jade and the PowerPage's Jason O'Grady to force them to identify sources who provided accurate details of an unreleased hardware product code-named Asteroid. The journalists refused to cooperate and instead enlisted the services of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as their counsel.

The US National Security Agency has a legal charter to spy on foreigners online. Unfortunately Internet traffic is nearly impossible to sort by nationality of user, meaning the NSA is snooping on all US Web and email traffic and storing it, with the cooperation of US telecoms companies. This has been extensively documented in court cases filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including testimony from an AT&T cable technician who worked on dragnet hardware spliced into the Internet backbone cables routed through downtown San Francisco.

TACD is an umbrella group for consumer activists from the US and Europe, including the EFF, Public Knowledge, the Consumer Council of Norway, and UFC-Que Choisir of France (a group that also opposed the recent graduated response law there).

Late last week, it issued a lengthy resolution on intellectual property enforcement that included some strong language on ACTA. Not content with calling for a halt to negotiations, TACD demanded an end to the treaty's linguistic sleight of hand.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes the dicey nature of this claim. For starters, public performance royalties are generally due only when there is a "direct or indirect" commercial advantage to playing music, such as in a bar or restaurant. Comparing ringtones to such a use is like claiming car companies should pay the performance royalties when people listen to their car stereo with the windows open.

Copyright expert Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent blog post that under a Supreme Court precedent, the justices have concluded that punitive damages, generally, should be no higher than nine times the actual damages. The case is not squarely on-point with Thomas-Rasset’s, where the award was based on the statute, and not an arbitrary number intended purely to punish a defendant. But assuming each download in the Thomas-Rasset case is valued at $1, her judgment is at a ratio of a stunning 800,000-to-1.

The EFF's Fred von Lohman, who analyzed the filing, argues that the brief ignores some well-defined areas of precedent and the legal code. In short, he concludes that, if a ringtone constitutes a public performance, then so does playing the car radio when the windows are down.

"I think it's indefensibly invasive and likely illegal as a violation of the First Amendment rights of job applicants," EFF attorney Kevin Bankston told CNET News earlier this week. "Essentially, they're conditioning your application for employment on your waiving your First Amendment rights...and risking the security of your information by requiring you to share your password with them...Where does it stop? How about a photocopy of your diary?"

"It's always a good development when a civil liberties perspective gets injected in a corporate culture," said Kevin Bankston, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Instead of advocating for the general public, he's advocating for Facebook users, which is quickly becoming synonymous with the general public."

"I think $2 million for downloading 24 songs strikes almost everyone as being a little disproportionate," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "According to people who were in the courtroom, almost everyone inside uttered an audible gasp when that verdict came in."

American intelligence agencies have been accused of spying on the emails of millions of Americans, including those of former president Bill Clinton...

"Ordinary Americans' most private emails have been and still are being intercepted in bulk and then stored in secret NSA databases, without probable cause," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the campaign group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

With the Obama administration bizarrely claiming that documents pertaining to negotiations over ACTA, the industry-written treaty that will push countries to change their copyright laws, are somehow a state secret, EFF and Public Knowledge have reluctantly decided to drop their lawsuit to try to open up the proceedings and get access to the documents (freely shared with industry lobbyists, but kept secret from consumers or consumer watchdogs).

Everybody who religiously reads those terms-of-use documents that Web sites and services ask us to accept -- then re-reads them after every announced change -- can stop reading this post now.

Now that I've reduced my readership by two, let me tell you about an interesting Web site that debuted a couple of weeks ago. TOSBack -- a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based online civil-liberties group -- monitors the terms-of-service rules of 58 sites and services, using open-source software to scan for revisions, then highlight deletions in blue and additions in yellow.

Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service...

“The disproportionate size of the verdict raises constitutional questions,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the consumer group Electronic Frontier Foundation that’s criticized the music industry’s tactics. “Was the jury punishing her for what she did, or punishing her for the music sharing habits of tens of millions of American Internet users?”

If you're planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Montana, be prepared to hand over much more than your references and résumé...

An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco, questioned Bozeman's choice to ask for usernames and passwords.

"I think its indefensibly invasive and likely illegal as a violation of
the First Amendment rights of job applicants," said Kevin Bankston, an EFF attorney. "Essentially they're conditioning your application for employment on your waiving your First Amendment rights ... and risking the security of your information by requiring you to share your password with them... Where does it stop? How about a photocopy of your diary?"

Fred von Lohmann's love for music, film and art goes way beyond mere consumerism. Not only does he devote his life's work to free expression, but he's also a fan.

"Everybody who cares about art is a fan of something. Whatever that might be, the Internet has really democratized access to that information," von Lohmann said.

I decided to track down some experts and get some perspective on different proxy servers and the laws surrounding them. In this entry, I speak with Andrew Lewman, the Executive Directory of the Tor Project about Tor and I also get some legal guidance from Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Obama administration's promises to increase transparency in government gained strength during Sunshine Week in March when Attorney General Eric Holder issued a far-reaching memo for agencies on the Freedom of Information Act...

"The articulation of the policy has been fairly good, starting with the president, men fleshed out by the AG and then . . . with the OIP guidance," said David Sobel, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "All of which I diink are very positive."

In writing about ridiculously bad patents, we've seen a trend of commenters insisting that if a patent is truly "bad," then there's no problem, since it will likely get rejected. However, the process of getting a bogus patent rejected is ridiculously long and cumbersome. The EFF is rightfully happy that the USPTO is going to throw out a ridiculous patent on web subdomains, presenting another victory for the EFF's Patent Busting Project.

A Bay Area think tank noted that the DTV transition arrived without the broadcast flag, a code embedded into HDTV content meant to prevent copyright violation...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the groups that fought the flag in court.

YouTube has agreed to ditch its monitoring cookies for videos viewed on the official White House Web site, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the government for taking it," Cindy Cohn, legal director at EFF, wrote in a blog post. "It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software."

In an apparent acknowledgment of the concerns expressed by privacy advocates, YouTube has changed its use of tracking cookies for videos embedded on the Whitehouse.gov Web site...

Cindy Cohn, the legal director with the EFF wrote about the more recent change, said that YouTube will continue to use cookies for storing user preferences, but will ignore tracking cookies on Whitehouse.gov. In an interview, Cohn welcomed the change and said she hopes that YouTube will adopt a similar cookie use policy for videos embedded on other government sites.

In a replay of a court decision from two years ago, civil liberties groups are once again trying to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that e-mail messages deserve the same privacy protection as telephone calls...

In a statement, EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston says that the Justice Department conducted what amounts to a "back-door wiretap" when it intercepted six months of Warshak's e-mail without a warrant. "Thankfully, this abuse has given the appeals court yet another opportunity to clarify that the Fourth Amendment protects the privacy of e-mail against secret government snooping, even when it's in the hands of an e-mail provider," he said.

Corryne McSherry, a staff attorney with the digital-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the new defense team is taking a creative approach. She said it would have been interesting to see how all the cases that settled might have turned out if those defendants had free lawyers who were willing to push as hard.

"This case could end up being the tail end of a frankly shameful and certainly failed campaign to go after users," McSherry said. "Maybe this will be the coda to that long campaign."

In the course of gathering electronic evidence in an investigation, apparently the Justice Department sometimes has trouble telling the difference between a subpoena of "stored communications" and warrantless wiretapping... So, the EFF filed an amicus brief in Warshak v. United States to help ensure that the DOJ's apparent confusion isn't transmitted to the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

It's difficult enough to parse a lengthy TOS for one web-based service, let alone for dozens, or to keep track of when and how they update them. It would be nice if some public-service website out there would keep track of this stuff for all of us, wouldn't it? Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) did just that with the launch of TOSBAck.org, "the terms-of-service tracker." It tracks TOS agreements for 44 different services, including Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, and eBay.

It doesn't seem like it, but 20 years ago today, the dot-com era was born. On June 8, 1989, Brad Templeton, started Clarinet.com, an online newspaper business that many consider to be the company that started it all.

"ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its platform for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of the 'dot-com' concept which so affected the world in the two intervening decades.," said Templeton, who for many years has been president and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The first celebrity lawsuit against Twitter came and went as fast as a tweet -- or did it?...

"It may be part of the calculus that they shouldn't fold now because others might make the same arguments against them," said Corynne McSherry, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer who's following the case. "There is that risk if you settle right away."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has become the latest victim of Apple's iTunes App Store "objectionable" content policy, after a submitted app was rejected over a link to a YouTube parody video.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday launched a new online tool that tracks changes in the Terms of Service agreements of 44 Web sites like Google, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Facebook...

Most people skip reading the TOS because it's boring and confusing. "When you do look at it, in most cases you've got to be a lawyer to understand it," said Tim Jones, the foundation's activism and technology manager. "And even if you are a lawyer, a lot of it can be vague."

A federal judge in San Francisco has thrown out more than 30 lawsuits against AT&T and other phone companies...

"We need to be able to trust them," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sued the phone companies. "The only way we can have trust in them is if there's accountability when they violate our privacy rights."

A new Web site unveiled Thursday will track policies imposed by popular Internet sites such as Facebook and Google, hoping to help users spot potentially harmful changes.

TOSBack.org, the brainchild of privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, will track terms of service modifications within hours of an update.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Thursday launched a new online site that keeps track of the policy changes at popular Web sites as specified in their terms of service...

"'Terms of Service' policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information," the EFF said in a statement. "But most web users don't read these policies--or understand that the terms are constantly changing."

The EFF just launched a service for tracking Terms of Service changes of 44 major sites including Google, Apple and recursively the EFF. TOSBack provides a feed of changes. In the screenshot below you can see a comparison of Facebook's privacy policy, which has been updated to Facebook's new address.

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed lawsuits targeting the nation’s telecommunication companies for their participation in President George W. Bush’s once-secret electronic eavesdropping program...

“We’re disappointed,” said Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director. “We think the judge is wrong.”

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out more than three dozen lawsuits claiming that the nation’s major telecommunications companies had illegally assisted in the wiretapping without warrants program approved by President George W. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks...

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said one “silver lining” was that Judge Walker had kept intact related claims against the government over the wiretapping program, as well as a suit by an Oregon charity that says it has evidence it was a target of wiretapping without warrants.

A federal judge in San Francisco has tossed out a slew of lawsuits filed against AT&T and other telecommunications companies alleged to have illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency...

EFF said it would appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. "We're deeply disappointed in Judge Walker's ruling today," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said in a statement. "The retroactive immunity law unconstitutionally takes away Americans' claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments, violates the federal government's separation of powers as established in the Constitution, and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law."

China is barring foreign journalists from visiting Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on the 20th anniversary of a brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. China is also blocking Internet access...

"Well, usually it's primarily about people learning about what happened in Tiananmen Square," said Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has become the latest victim of Apple's iTunes App Store "objectionable" content policy, after a submitted app was rejected over a link to a YouTube parody video...

McSherry responds in the EFF post saying: "This is just the latest example of the failings of Apple's iTunes App Store approval process, which has been revealed to be not just anti-competitive, discriminatory, censorial, and arbitrary, but downright absurd."

It's pretty clear that Apple's policies covering what iPhone applications are acceptable for its App Store are pretty absurd and arbitrary...

The company may have now unwittingly given a little more juice to the EFF's claims that the approval process is arbitrary, censorial and anti-competitive, though, by rejecting an application that displays the EFF's RSS feed.

In my last post, I challenged you to read and consider the ramifications for the CyberSecurity Act of 2009 that is currently in the congressional queue...

Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, “The bill would give the Commerce Department absolute, non-emergency access to ‘all relevant data’ without any privacy safeguards like standards or judicial review. The broad scope of this provision could eviscerate statutory protections for private information, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, or financial privacy regulations.“

Some of the world's most popular networking services have gone dark in China, apparent victims of government censors in the days leading to a notorious anniversary...

"Authorities make a point of locking down public discussion this time of year — especially tools like Twitter and Flickr that could be used to organize protests," says Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit.