In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.

...

Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. The Philadelphia billboard was installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements. It installed the A&E billboard in association with Pearl Media, a Butler, N.J., company.

“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

The U.S. Congress may soon vote on a new "compromise" spy law that would still likely derail pending suits against AT&T and other companies accused of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap law.

...

Critics--including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which have filed legal challenges against the surveillance activities--say that would amount to a rubber stamp of sorts on any past warrantless eavesdropping.

I was dismayed to learn that Tsering Woeser, the prominent Tibetan poet and blogger, has been under attack from the Honker Union.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that the hacker group has broken into Woeser's Skype account, and is advising anyone in the dissident network to block any form of communication from her account.

Copyright law is arcane enough, but a debate bubbling in Congress and among artists, libraries, and museums is important despite its obscurity.

The issue is "orphan works" - writing, photographs, paintings, and music whose copyright-holders are difficult (or impossible) to locate or contact.

Corynne McSherry, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the result is that a library or museum will not make the material available to the public because of the potential penalty of statutory damages - which have a ceiling of $150,000 per copyrighted item.

A museum is "worried that it might get sued," McSherry said. "So the material stays locked away."

The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal, argues Bill Thompson.

...

The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.

A federal district judge in Washington State handed down an important decision this week on shrink-wrap license agreements and the First Sale Doctrine. The case concerned an eBay merchant named Timothy Vernor who has repeatedly locked horns with Autodesk over the sale of used copies of its software. Autodesk argued that it only licenses copies of its software, rather than selling them, and that therefore any resale of the software constitutes copyright infringement.

...

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry put it in a Thursday blog post, "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck." Autodesk clearly sells its software, and merely re-labeling the transaction as a license doesn't negate the First Sale Doctrine.

The oft-maligned Transportation Security Agency (TSA) has earned a reputation for ridiculous overreach, confiscating fingernail clippers, tweezers and assorted benign implements on the grounds it could be used to hijack an airplane.

...

The government's position appears to be that you have no right to know what the rules are, despite a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and repeated attempts by a Florida law firm to find out.

When a federal judge ordered Rep. Jim McDermott to pay House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and his attorneys more than $1 million in damages and legal fees for leaking an illegally taped phone call to the media, Boehner said he pursued the case because “no one — including members of Congress — is above the law.”

...

“Mr. Boehner is trying to kick millions of Americans out of court in a wiretapping case while collecting more than $1 million in his own wiretapping case. It’s the height of hypocrisy and seems to indicate that members of Congress are entitled to their day in court but the average American is not,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the consumer rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

After reports of Vista refusing to record select programming from NBC, online interest group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the same thing is happening for over-the-air (OTA) programming.

One user has reported that while attempting to record TV shows from Raleigh's WNCN high definition channel -- the NBC affiliate in the area -- an alert shows up saying that the broadcaster has disabled recording of the programming.

Two prominent congressmen are asking Charter Communications not to begin testing a program under which it will track the browsing habits of its high-speed Internet customers in order to send them targeted ads.

...

Barry Orton, a UW-Madison professor of telecommunications who closely follows such issues, Lee Tien, EFF senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based civil liberties advocacy group similar to the American Civil Liberties Union, also raised issues of privacy and legality in interviews with The Capital Times on Thursday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun investigating why Microsoft Vista Media Centers were blocked from recording two NBC Universal shows Monday night.

The group, which advocates for Internet users, said indications are that NBC sent a "broadcast flag" that triggered the block. But Danny O'Brien, EFF's international outreach coordinator, said the block couldn't have occurred unless hardware and software makers honored the network's request to prevent users from recording the shows. It appears Microsoft may have obeyed NBC Universal's broadcast flag.

After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however.

Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

...

Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

Talks are under way between lawmakers in Congress and the Bush administration to resolve a long-running dispute over whether U.S. telephone companies alleged to have participated in the government's warrantless wiretapping program should be given immunity from civil lawsuits.

...

The plaintiffs in the suits are individuals who claim their civil liberties were violated when they became the subject of surveillance, and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which are opposed to the program on first amendment grounds.

Entertainment industry executives have floated all sorts of ideas to tackle piracy at the Internet service provider level. Some Hollywood suits have proposed that ISPs filter their networks for pirated content, while others have asked Congress to order colleges to consider filters.

...

The French equivalent of the RIAA is pressuring the government to move forward with this scheme before the summer recess. But that timetable looks extremely unlikely, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation reports.

Three film studios have sued four Ohio residents to stop them from illegally sharing movies online, part of a string of similar lawsuits filed around the country in recent years.

The Ohio residents have distributed the films "Hitch," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Good Night and Good Luck," among others, according to the lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. and two subsidiaries of Sony Pictures -- Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. and Screen Gems Inc.

...

The movie studios have been somewhat more creative in their approach to the problem, said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit and online free-speech advocate.

But the film industry's lawsuits are still a big club to use against individuals and aren't all that successful in addressing the overall problem, McSherry said.

"It's thousands of people who are essentially being terrorized and intimidated," she said. "Paying lawyers a lot of money to sue your potential customers is a really bad approach to growing your business."

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups.

The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That's because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter (NSL), is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.

Wikipedia has been caught up in a defamation case after a New Jersey literary agent received an unflattering entry in the online encyclopaedia.

...

Wikipedia is being aided in the case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and both groups filed a motion on 1 May asking for the suit to be dismissed.

"Wikipedia continues to be a tremendous resource for people around the globe, " said EFF senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman.

"Without strong liability protection, it would be difficult for Wikipedia to continue to provide a platform for user-created content."

A broad coalition of technology groups today told a federal appeals court to toss out a lawsuit that adware maker Zango is continuing to pursue against computer security vendor Kaspersky Lab, arguing that to do otherwise would harm consumers and the future of the security software market.

...

In a "friend of the court" brief filed with the appeals court today, a diverse collection of technology groups rallied behind Kaspersky in support of preserving the lower court ruling. Signatories to the brief include the Business Software Alliance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (it's not often the BSA and EFF see eye-to-eye on tech issues), McAfee, Sunbelt Software and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT).

The call came in to police just after midnight April 16.

Hours before, a distraught young man had phoned his mother, hinting he wanted to kill himself. When he didn't meet her as planned, she telephoned Seattle police and reported her son missing.

...

"What you'd want is those rules to be in place, and, as far as we know, they are not," said Rebecca Jechke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton Thursday filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the operator of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, arguing that federal law immunizes it against suits over statements made by its users.

Literary agent Barbara Bauer filed a complaint in New Jersey Superior Court in January against Wikipedia posters as well as the site itself, claiming in part that the Wikimedia Foundation was liable for statements identifying her as one the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents and that she had "no documented sales at all." In court papers filed Thursday, Wikimedia argues that under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, operators of "interactive computer services" such as Wikipedia cannot be held liable for users' comments. In addition, Wikimedia argues that the statements are protected speech under the First Amendment and New Jersey law.