We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and we’re thrilled to be celebrating a quarter-century of fighting for digital rights. We’re kicking off this milestone in two ways: a membership drive and a party and minicon in San Francisco on July 16. We’re asking people to donate and become members because we fight passionately for the rights of individuals—and in turn, rely…

On June 22, 2013, ARL joined an amicus brief of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal, currently pending in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, supporting the respondent, LiveJournal. The case involves a LiveJournal blog, Oh No…

Last week, CCIA filed two amicus briefs in copyright cases: Mavrix v. LiveJournal, a 9th Cir. case about the DMCA safe harbors, and Elsevier v. Sci-Hub, an S.D.N.Y. copyright case involving proposed preliminary injunctions against non-party intermediaries. CCIA’s brief in Mavrix v. LiveJournal, joined by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research…

Sadly, today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decision in Oracle v. Google. Oracle claims a copyright on the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and that Google infringed that copyright by using certain Java APIs in the Android OS. The Federal Circuit had ruled in Oracle’s favor, reversing a well-reasoned district court opinion holding that…

This morning the Supreme Court issued an order indicating that it was declining to hear an appeal of the copyright case between Oracle and Google.  The appeal concerned the copyrightability of “application programming interfaces” (APIs).  Oracle launched the suit against Google shortly after acquiring Sun, which held copyrights and patents on the Java computer language, in 2010.  It claimed that Android infringed Java copyrights because Android…

Today, the Supreme Court announced that it has refused to hear the Google v. Oracle case. The case involves the copyrightability of Oracle’s application programming interface (API), a part of the Java programming language and system. The case attracted widespread attention last May, when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Oracle could assert a copyright over…

Since our report last week on Australia’s Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites that have the primary purpose of infringing copyright, or “facilitating” its infringement—a term that…

You may be used to thinking of the Internet as being built of:  Services that directly connect you to the Internet; Services that offer their own content to the Internet; and Services that host your content (or someone else’s) on the Internet. But of course, today’s Internet ecology is more complicated than that. A “content delivery network” (CDN) service like…

On June 4, 2015 the Copyright Office released its Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. Previous coverage of the orphan works section of the report is available here and the Library Copyright Alliance’s response to the report is available here. This post focuses on the section of the report covering mass digitization and lays out concerns with the report’s…

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu this campaign season, you’re not alone. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just earned public backlash from singer Neil Young for using Young’s song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Young claimed that Trump used the song without seeking his permission. While true, the hitch here is that Trump didn’t actually have to ask….