Coding with EFF

California’s bill, AB 2047, will not only mandate censorware on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of DRM won’t make anyone safer, but it will hurt innovation in the state and risks a slew of new consumer harms ranging from surveillance...

Higbee & Associates, a law firm known for sending copyright demand letters to website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn’t post the photo. It didn’t even own the website where the photo...

Legislators across the U.S. are proposing laws to force “print blockers” on 3D printers sold in their states. This mandated censorware is doomed to fail for its intended purpose, but will still manage to hurt the professional and hobbyist communities relying on these tools.

When legislators give companies an excuse to write untouchable code, it’s a disaster for everyone. This time, 3D printers are being targeted. Even if you’ve never used one, you’ve benefited from the open commons these devices have created. We need to roundly reject these onerous restraints on creation.

In Cox v. Sony, the Court reversed a Fourth Circuit decision that had upheld a billion-dollar verdict against internet provider Cox Communications. We live in a world where high speed internet access is a necessity for participation in everyday life. That’s why liability for ISPs for their customers’ actions should...

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever...

In this case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, appellant Emmerich Newspapers is calling for the court to subject some of the internet’s most fundamental and useful functions—linking and embedding—to staggering new potential liability. For nearly two decades, a pragmatic interpretation of the Copyright Act’s public display right, known...

We are inundated with advertisements and exhortations to use the latest AI-powered apps, and with hype insisting AI can solve any problem. Obscured by this hype, there are some real examples of AI proving to be a helpful tool. So let’s look at the real-world landscape.

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.