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The Electronic Frontier Foundation | Blog Posts

The Electronic Frontier Foundation: Defending your rights in the digital world.

Calling All iPhone Developers: Support EFF's DMCA Exemption for JailbreakingYesterday

iPhone application developers have until February 2, 2009 to submit comments to the 201/comment-forms/">sharing your experience with the Copyright Office and supporting EFF's proposed DMCA exemption for jailbreaking.

Fox News Censors Political ExpressionJanuary 7

In a scenario that has become depressingly familiar, a news organization has again used the Digital Millennium ”if, and only if, service providers, users and content owners all do their parts to protect free speech.

Apple Shows Us DRM's True ColorsJanuary 7

At this week's Macworld Expo, Apple announced that by April, music from the iTunes Store will no longer be shackled by digital rights management (DRM). Finally, DRM is good and fully dead for digital music -- gone from CDs, gone from downloads, and largely dead for streaming.

Apple's announcement comes nearly a year after Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 deals went live, demonstrating that the record labels were holding the DRM card until they could wring business concessions from Apple (in the form of variable pricing). This just underscores that DRM is not really about stopping piracy, but rather about leverage over authorized distributors.

In fact, an inventory of Apple's remaining DRM armory makes it vividly clear that DRM (backed by the DMCA) is almost always about eliminating legitimate competition, hobbling interoperability, and creating de facto technology monopolies:

• Apple uses DRM to lock iPhones to AT&T and Apple's iTunes App Store;
• Apple uses DRM to prevent recent iPods from syncing with software other than iTunes (Apple

Patent Office Grants EFF's Request for Reexamination of Patent on Internet Music FilesJanuary 7

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination of an illegitimate music patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). This was the sixth reexamination request filed by EFF's Patent Busting Project and the sixth time the PTO has granted EFF's request.

Seer Systems was awarded this patent for a system and method for joining different musical data types together in a file, distributing them over the Internet, and then playing that file. In the reexamination request, EFF, along with the law firm Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder, show that descriptions of this technology were published a number of times before Seer Systems made its claim—including in a book written by Seer's own founder and the named inventor of the patent, Stanley Jungleib.

"Mr. Jungleib encouraged others to use the techniques he described in his book and sought patent protection only after those ideas had entered the public domain," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Michael Kwun. "It's unfortunate that Seer Systems didn't call Mr. Jungleib's book and the other prior art we cited to the PTO's attention before the patent issued."

Seer Systems now has the opportunity to file comments defending the patent, and then the PTO will determine whether to invalidate the patent. The PTO has narrowed or revoked roughly 70% of patents it has decided to reexamine.

"Unmeritorious patents can place significant barriers in the way of innov

UMG v. Veoh: Another Victory for Web 2.0January 5

Over the holidays, video hosting site Veoh won another victory under the DMCA safe harbors, this time against Universal Music Group (UMG). The ruling should put to rest the argument that transcoding and other activities necessary for making content accessible on the web are not covered by the DMCA's Section 512(c) safe harbor for storing material on behalf of users (i.e., hosting user-generated content). This is good news not just for Veoh, but also for YouTube and every other site that hosts material uploaded by users.

Like many other companies that host content on behalf of users, 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 full cost of policing for infringement. Fortunately, Congress enacted the DMCA's safe harbor provisions back in 1998 to protect service providers from exactly these risks, offering immunity from copyright damages to those who implement a notice-and-takedown system. In August 2008, Veoh won a big victory against adult video purveyor Io Group, relying on these provisions.