The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is fighting back against Uri Geller -- the "paranormalist" famous for seemingly bending spoons with his mind -- on behalf of a YouTube critic who was silenced by Geller's baseless copyright claims.
EFF's client, Brian Sapient, belongs to a group called the "Rational...

The parties in this case, software companies SAS Institute Inc. (SAS) and World Programming Ltd. (WPL), have been feuding for years in multiple courts in the U.S. and abroad. At the heart of the case is SAS’s effort to effectively own the SAS Language, a high-level programming language used to...

California State Senator Mark Leno has introduced important new legislation that protects email privacy. Senate Bill 467, sponsored by EFF, requires state law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before asking service providers to hand over a private citizen's emails.
EFF has long been concerned with law enforcement claims...

EFF and The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) have urged the United States Supreme Court to protect the free speech rights of videogame creators and users asking the justices to uphold a ruling throwing out unconstitutional restrictions on violent videogames.
At issue is a California law that bans the...

EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanding the release of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access to Americans' telephone records without any legal process or oversight.

EFF asked a federal court to protect the free speech rights of an animal welfare group after its video critiques of animal treatment at rodeos were removed from YouTube due to sham copyright claims.
The group Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) is a non-profit organization that videotapes and...

Part of the goal of the USA Freedom Act was to end secret law. Section 402 of USA Freedom requires the federal government to declassify and release all "significant" opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—the federal court that reviews the legality of many of the government's national security...

In February 2008 EFF requested documents from the FBI related to its surveillance of Skype communications a common Voice-over-IP (VoIP) program. The request came after an article in Computerworld Magazine suggesting that German law enforcement had commissioned a private company to create "Skype-hacking Trojan." EFF sought to discover whether...

In July 2014 the EFF, along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, joined the legal team for Anna Smith, an Idaho emergency neonatal nurse, in her challenge of the government's bulk collection of the telephone records of millions of innocent Americans.Smith...

EFF have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to focus on the privacy issues at stake in a battle over the sale and data mining of medical records urging justices to reverse a ruling that could jeopardize patient privacy.
At issue is Vermont's Prescription Confidentially Law which bans pharmacies from...

State of Maryland v. Andrews is the first case in the country (that we know of) where an appellate court has held the Fourth Amendment precludes using a cell-site simulator (commonly known as a Stingray) without a warrant.
In the case, Baltimore Police used a Hailstorm—a device from...

EFF submitted an amicus brief to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, arguing that people have an expectation of privacy in text message conversations, regardless of whether that conversation is stored on the their own phone or someone else's.
Police responded to a 911 call that a child in an...

In this case EFF sought information concerning the Pentagon's monitoring of military websites including soldiers' blogs. According to news reports an Army unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell ("AWRAC") reviews hundreds of thousands of websites every month notifying webmasters and bloggers when it sees information it finds inappropriate....

TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods is a U.S. Supreme Court case that effectively asked the court to decide whether patent owners could sue in practically any corner of the country. The law as interpreted by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and under review by the Supreme Court,...

The Terrorist Screening Center maintains the U.S. government’s consolidated terrorist watch list. Since its creation in 2003, the list has been criticized repeatedly for its lack of accuracy and effective redress among other flaws. EFF has submitted FOIA requests for complaints from individuals who believe they've wrongly...

Update: As a result of the petition, the federal court and prosecutors agreed in 2018 to implement new docketing and reporting procedures that will allow for greater public access to the judicial records sought by The Stranger.EFF is representing The Stranger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, in a petition...

EFF is representing Jason Cugle and his company Triple7Vaping.com LLC against claims that running a small mail-order business selling accessories for electronic cigarettes infringes four patents owned by Shipping & Transit LLC. Cugle, a Maryland resident, received a letter from Shipping & Transit accusing his company and website of violating...

EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in U.S. Telecom Association v. FCC, a lawsuit by telecommunications providers challenging the government's net neutrality rules, which will, among other things, prevent Internet service providers from interfering and censoring content on the Web.
Our brief defends the part of the...

The Milwaukee Police Department secretly used a Stingray to locate defendant Patrick through his cell phone without a warrant. As we’ve seen in other cases involving Stingrays, the government did everything it could in this case to hide the fact that it used the device—from the court that issued the...

Like many other companies that host content on behalf of users, video-hosting service Veoh has been bedeviled by copyright lawsuits. The copyright owners make the same argument in each of these suits: the hosting service should be liable for every infringing bit uploaded by naughty users and responsible for the...

This is one of many patent cases filed by Uniloc--one of the most active patent trolls in the world that filed more than 170 lawsuits in a year. Since then, various Uniloc entities have filed hundreds of patent suits, including this one against Apple in the Northern District of...

EFF has filed three separate amicus briefs in this criminal case, explaining why the government’s repeatedly expansive interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) threatens people engaging in innocent behavior with criminal liability.
David Nosal, an ex-employee of the Korn/Ferry executive recruiting firm, was charged with violating...

Army officials were investigating a contractor for theft and other misconduct arising from Army contracts. In 2003, they obtained a search warrant seeking computer files and records from the company's outside accountant, Stavros Ganias. Investigators made a mirror image of three of Ganias' computers on site, copying information relevant to...

New York City police officer Gilberto Valle was criminally charged in New York federal court in connection with his participation in chat rooms concerning fantasy role-playing fetish websites involving cannibalism. Valle was indicted for conspiring to kidnap and with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") for using...

Agron Hasbajrami is a U.S. resident who was arrested at JFK airport in 2011 on his way to Pakistan and charged with providing material support to terrorists. Although the government used Section 702, its warrantless Internet surveillance authority, to build its case against Hasbajrami, it withheld this fact from his...

The case arises out of Matthew Keys turning over the username and password of the content management system of his former employer, the Tribune Company, to members of Anonymous in an online chat room. An individual going by the name of “Sharpie” then used the credentials to log into the...

UPDATE: Mr. Saboonchi was released from prison in January 2016 as part of President Obama's prisoner swap with Iran, and therefore dropped his Fourth Circuit appeal.
EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit arguing that the Fourth Amendment requires...

EFF sued the DOJ and FBI to shine light on the U.S. Marshal Service’s (USMS) use of small aircraft mounted with controversial cell-phone tracking systems.
The Wall Street Journal revealed last year that the Marshals have been flying small, fixed-wing Cessna planes mounted with IMSI catchers—devices that emulate cell...

EFF has urged a federal court to reject bogus copyright claims in a ringtone royalty battle that could raise costs for consumers jeopardize consumer rights and curtail new technological innovation.
Millions of Americans have bought musical ringtones for their mobile phones often clips from a favorite popular song. Mobile...

EFF and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers asked a federal appeals court to block the government's attempt to wrongly expand federal computer crime law turning misdemeanor charges into felonies.
In an amicus brief filed in U.S. v. Cioni EFF argued that federal prosecutors abused computer crime law...

The defendant Lori Drew was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by using a fictitious name and age on a MySpace account and using that account to make hurtful comments to a teenage girl. Tragically the girl later took her own life. Federal prosecutors claim that...

EFF urged a federal district court in Colorado to block the government's attempt to force a woman to enter a password into an encrypted laptop, arguing that it would violate her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
A defendant in this case, Ramona Fricosu, is accused of fraudulent real estate...

EFF and a coalition of academics and public policy groups are urging a federal judge to dismiss a criminal indictment that could give websites extraordinary power to dictate what behavior becomes a computer crime.
The four defendants in this case are the operators of Wiseguys Tickets Inc. a ticket-reselling...

Ropp Ruling October 8 2004

In August of 2009, Pennyslvania-based company USA Technologies filed a federal lawsuit against two Yahoo! message board posters who roundly criticized what they claim is the the consistently poor performance of USA Technologies' management. The criticism highlighted plummeting stock prices of the company, shares of which have lost...

This page provides resources to assist those sued by the U.S. Copyright Group aka SaveCinema.org aka the lawfirm of Dunlap Grubb & Weaver
Background
Starting in the Spring of 2010, a Washington D.C. law firm calling itself the "U.S. Copyright Group" (USCG) launched a series of predatory...

A former Georgia police officer who was wrongly convicted under the notoriously vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") is asking the Supreme Court to reject a dangerously overbroad interpretation of the law. In Van Buren v. United States, Nathan Van Buren was accused of taking money in exchange for...

This case tests whether the "first sale doctrine" in copyright law -- which makes it legal to resell, lend, or give away books, CDs, DVDs, and software that you own -- will survive in the digital age of "licensed" content.
Timothy Vernor is an online software reseller who...