EFF Breaking News

In keeping with a growing trend, this week Federal Judge Bernard Zimmerman of the Northern District of California severed 5,010 Doe Defendants from a single case—effectively dismissing all but one defendant. EFF participated in the case as amicus.

This case, like many we’ve seen around the country, involved a pornographic work. Plaintiff sued more than 5,000 individuals anonymously based only on their ISP addresses, for allegedly exchanging an infringing file over a BitTorrent network. The copyright owner claimed that participation in BitTorrent “swarm” was a form of conspiracy, meaning it could sue everyone at once in California.

What has long been an EFF issue is once again making headlines. In recent days, the world is seeing damning reports of authoritarian regimes spying on their citizens using American- and European-made surveillance technologies, with new evidence emerging from Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Thailand.

Yesterday, EFF lawyers urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle to allow our two lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency's illegal mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans to continue. For those who couldn't attend in person, we have the next best thing: audio recordings of the oral arguments in both Jewel v. NSA (MP3, WMA, OGG) and Hepting v. AT&T (MP3, WMA, OGG).

As you probably know, we’ve been closely following the Lodsys mess and watching as the patent troll asserts its patents against companies large and small, and — famously and most egregiously — against small app developers. Large companies such as Best Buy, CVS, and the New York Times Company are fighting Lodsys in court (and challenging the validity of its patents). But those lawsuits could take years. In the meantime, app developers all over the world, many of who cannot afford legal counsel, face the uncertainty long-felt by the victims of patent trolls and are left wondering what they can and should do to protect themselves.

This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home — first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest. Last week, protesters disrupted BART service in response to the fatal shooting of Charles Blair Hill by BART police on July 3rd. Thursday’s protest failed to materialize, possibly because the disruption of cell phone service made organization and coordination difficult.

By now, we’ve all heard the traditional content industries complain about how technology hurts their business model. But, of course, the story does not end there. While the record labels, movie studios, and video game producers have not figured out a way to compete with free, others have. And this is good news for the rest of us, because it reduces the influence of the traditional gatekeepers who formerly operated an ironclad monopoly on what content we could experience and at what costs, and also because it allows developers and artists without major deals to widely distribute their work and to find new ways to get paid.

Earlier this year, two research papers reported the observation of strange phenomena in the Domain Name System (DNS) at several US ISPs. On these ISPs' networks, some or all traffic to major search engines, including Bing, Yahoo! and (sometimes) Google, is being directed to mysterious third party proxies.

In a major blow to one of the most pernicious copyright trolls now operating, the US Copyright Group (USCG), federal judge Robert Wilkins of the District of Columbia has effectively dismissed thousands of Doe defendants due to lack of jurisdiction.

Despite serious privacy concerns being voiced by both Democratic and Republican leaders and by thousands of digital rights activists using EFF's Action Center, this afternoon the House Judiciary Committee voted 19 to 10 to recommend passage of H.R. 1981. That bill contains a mandatory data retention provision that would require your Internet service providers to retain 12 months' worth of personal information that could be used to identify what web sites you visit and what content you post online.

The copyright trolling world has been hopping in the past several weeks, and some developments seem to bode well for the protection of due process. All in all, we’ve seen the number of total Does sued rise to over 190,000, and we estimate that the number of Does remaining after the various dismissals is over 140,000. The following are the cases in which Does have been dismissed since we last reported.