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Français: Au sujet de l'EFF About EFFGeneral Information About the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Imagine a world where technology can empower us all to share knowledge, ideas, thoughts, humor, music, words and art with friends, strangers and future generations. That world is here and now, made possible with the electronic network -- the Internet -- with the power to connect us all. And future developments in technology will enable us to access information and communicate with others in even more powerful ways. But governments and corporate interests worldwide are trying to prevent us from communicating freely through new technologies, just as when those in positions of power controlled the production and distribution of -- or even burned -- books they did not want people to read in the Middle Ages. But only by fighting for our rights to speak freely whatever the medium -- whether books, telephones, or computers -- can we protect and enhance the human condition. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was created to defend our rights to think, speak, and share our ideas, thoughts, and needs using new technologies, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. EFF is the first to identify threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression in the digital age. Who We AreBased in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology; to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties. Among our various activities, EFF opposes misguided legislation, initiates and defends court cases preserving individuals' rights, launches global public campaigns, introduces leading edge proposals and papers, hosts frequent educational events, engages the press regularly, and publishes a comprehensive archive of digital civil liberties information at one of the most linked-to websites in the world: http://www.eff.org.A History of Protecting Freedom Where Law and Technology CollideThe Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July of 1990 in response to a basic threat to speech. The United States Secret Service conducted series of raids tracking the distribution of a document illegally copied from a BellSouth computer that described how the emergency 911 system worked, referred to as the E911 document. The Secret Service believed that if "hackers" knew how to use the telephone lines set aside for receiving emergency phone calls, the lines would become overloaded and people facing true emergencies would be unable to get through. One of the alleged recipients of the E911 document was the systems operator at a small games book publisher out of Austin, Texas, named Steve Jackson Games. The Secret Service executed a warrant against the innocent Jackson and took all electronic equipment and copies of an upcoming game book from Steve Jackson Games's premises. Steve Jackson panicked as he watched the deadline come and go for his latest release and still hadn't received his computers back. He was forced to lay off nearly half of his staff. In the end, the Secret Service returned all of Steve Jackson's computers and decided not to press charges against the company, since they were unable to find any copies of the E911 document on any of the computers. In the meantime, Steve Jackson's business was nearly ruined. And when he and his employees had the opportunity to investigate the returned computers, they noticed that all of the electronic mail that had been stored on the company's electronic bulletin board computer, where non-employee users had dialed in and sent personal messages to one another, had been individually accessed and deleted. Steve Jackson was furious, as he believed his rights as a publisher had been violated and the free speech and privacy rights of his users had been violated. Steve Jackson tried desperately to find a civil liberties group to help him, to no avail. Unfortunately, none of the existing groups understood the technology well enough to understand the import of the issues. In an electronic community called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (now WELL.com) several informed technologists understood exactly what civil liberties issues were involved. Mitch Kapor, former president of Lotus Development Corporation, John Perry Barlow, Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, decided to do something about it. They formed an organization to work on civil liberties issues raised by new technologies. And on the day they formally announced the organization, they announced that they were representing Steve Jackson Games and several of the company's bulletin board users in a lawsuit they were bringing against the United States Secret Service. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was born! The Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one in the development of a proper legal framework for cyberspace. For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls. We take for granted today that law enforcement must have a warrant that particularly describes all electronic mail messages before seizing and reading them. The Steve Jackson Games case established that principle. The Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to take on cases that set important precedents for the treatment of rights in cyberspace. In our second big case, Bernstein v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, the United States government prohibited a University of California mathematics Ph.D. student from publishing on the Internet an encryption computer program he had created. Years before, the government had placed encryption, a method for scrambling messages so they can only be understood by their intended recipients, on the United States Munitions List, alongside bombs and flamethrowers, as a weapon to be regulated for national security purposes. Companies and individuals exporting items on the munitions list, including software with encryption capabilities, had to obtain prior State Department approval. Encryption export restrictions crippled American businesses and damaged the free speech rights of individuals. Critical for ecommerce, companies use encryption to safeguard sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, which they send or receive over electronic networks. Companies also secure access to software programs and provide system security using encryption. By limiting the export of encryption, technologies and methods, the U.S. government drove development of security software overseas, where American companies were unable to compete. The State Department was unsympathetic to Bernstein's situation and told Bernstein he would need a license to be an arms dealer before he could simply post the text of his encryption program on the Internet. They also told him that they would deny him an export license if he actually applied for one, because his technology was too secure. The Electronic Frontier Foundation pulled together a top-notch legal team and sued the United States government on behalf of Dan Bernstein. The court ruled, for the first time ever, that written software code is speech protected by the First Amendment. The court further ruled that the export control laws on encryption violated Bernstein's First Amendment rights by prohibiting his constitutionally protected speech. As a result, the government changed its export regulations. Now everyone has the right to "export" encryption software -- by publishing it on the Internet -- without prior permission from the U.S. government. Once again, the Electronic Frontier Foundation led the charge to establish important cyberspace rights. Today's IssuesWhile early threats to our right to communicate came from the government, current threats come also from industry, as it seeks to control and expand current revenue sources at the expense of traditional fair use. The trend has been for industry to use a combination of law and technology to suppress the rights of people using technology. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of copyright law, where the movie and recording studios are trying to dumb down technology to serve their "bottom lines" and manipulate copyright laws to tip the delicate balance toward intellectual property ownership and away from the right to think and speak freely. 2600 Case:In December of 1999, a Norwegian teenager who participated in the open source development of the Linux operating system, reverse-engineered the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption code on DVDs and posted his decryption code, called DeCSS, to the Internet. To make a DVD player for Linux-based machines, engineers closely examined existing DVD players, and new player software was written to operate similarly. This is a legal and common method of competing in all industries. The DeCSS code spread like wildfire among Linux developers on the Internet. 2600 Magazine, like many other members of the press, printed the code and a story describing DeCSS's importance on the magazine's website. The story also included a list of links to other locations publishing the code. Eight major motion picture studios sued 2600 Magazine based upon its publication of the DeCSS code, its news coverage of the controversy, and links the magazine provided to the code. The case was brought under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The 1998 law said that distribution of a tool that could be used to get around copyright protections was itself illegal. Any attempts to get to a digital work, even to use it for legitimate purposes (such as for scientific inquiry or presentation in educational materials) was in effect prohibited, since it was illegal to get past the copy protections to make the legal copies. It also meant that people who published the code were still vulnerable to prosecution, even if they never used the code to access any copyrighted materials. EFF rushed to the defense of 2600 Magazine to argue that the DMCA is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds since DeCSS was already widely available and therefore in the public domain and since the magazine has the right to publish and link to technology enabling the fair use of copyrighted materials. We pulled together a stellar legal team, including Kathleen Sullivan, noted constitutional scholar and Dean of Stanford Law School. The case is currently on appeal. Felten Case:The recording industry has tried for several years to establish methods of dispensing digital music that mirror their traditional revenue streams, where limited access to packaging and distribution channels creates a huge demand for their services. They have struggled with recent technological innovations, since the Internet does not require a "middleman" for artists to get music to their fans. In fact, the technology facilitates copying and distribution, making music industry attempts to maintain the current scarcity model very difficult indeed. The music industry asked several technology vendors to embed software in music to restrict use of the music. Using a music control technology, a copyright holder might choose to limit listeners to playing a song only once. Then the software would disable further playing of the song until the listener paid more money. Six different technologies were developed for the music industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). SDMI decided to challenge the Internet community to see if anyone could break through these embedded instructions on any of these technologies and issued the "Hack SDMI Challenge." As well as letting anyone try the Challenge, SDMI also offered $10,000 to anyone who was willing to sign over his or her winning method to SDMI and keep it secret from the public. A Princeton University computer science professor named Edward Felten participated in the challenge, along with graduate students from Princeton and Rice Universities and a researcher from Xerox PARC. They largely succeeded in defeating the technologies. They decided to forego the $10,000 prize, however, and sought to present their findings at a technical conference. A couple of weeks before the conference, Professor Felten received a threatening letter from SDMI telling him that if he made the presentation at the conference, the researchers, the universities and the conference itself would all be in violation of the DMCA. Professor Felten gave in to the forced censorship by SDMI and withdrew the paper at the last minute. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now representing Professor Felten and the other researchers in a lawsuit against the recording industry, asserting their rights under the First Amendment to publish and speak about their findings at a scientific conference and their right to publish and present future works. We also represent USENIX Association, which is sponsoring the conference where the paper is to be presented, and, of course, intends to sponsor future conferences. Related Challenge:In Pavlovich v. DVDCCA, the DVD Copy Control Association, which is associated with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is suing hundreds of individuals who put DeCSS on their websites, alleging that plaintiffs misappropriated trade secrets when they reverse engineered DVD technology. EFF is coordinating the defense and won an initial victory in December 2000 when the California Supreme Court granted defendant Matthew Pavlovich's petition for review, sending the matter back to the trial judge. At issue is whether California courts have jurisdiction over computer users outside California, the First Amendment right to free expression, and the right to engage in lawful reverse engineering. Challenging Internet Blocking:Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act (CHIPA), a controversial censorware law that will force public and private libraries and schools that receive federal funding to install Internet blocking or filtering software for both child and adult Internet users. As part of its Blue Ribbon Campaign, EFF opposes this mandatory censorware law. In March 2001, EFF, ACLU, the American Library Association (ALA) and other organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the new federal law. EFF believes that the government should not mandate how schools and libraries protect children from inappropriate materials. Filtering software is currently abysmally ineffective and damaging to the educational process, blocking out many materials that children should be able to see (including groups that do not share the same political philosophy as the filtering software manufacturer), and not effectively blocking materials that are legally obscene, child pornography or harmful to minors in a given local community. Studies have shown that the more effectively a filtering program blocks inappropriate materials, the more overblocking of appropriate materials occurs, restricting the flow of information available on the Internet to a trickle. Knowing this, schools and libraries may protect children in another way, such as through education on Internet use and age-appropriate supervision by parents, teachers and librarians. The federal government should not be involved. Along with the legal cases, EFF has been working with other groups, such as the Online Policy Group and the ACLU, on a public education campaign. Trademark Law - Domain Name Cases:EFF has taken on several legal cases to protect the right to publish on the Internet without fear of trademark infringement lawsuits. In the Ford v. Great Domains case, the Ford Motor Company has sued several independent website operators whose domain names contain the words "volvo," "ford" or "jaguar" using a law intended to prevent "cybersquatting." EFF is defending several of those charged by Ford. In the most egregious example, Ford is accusing www.jaguarcenter.com -- a site about big cats -- of trademark infringement. Anonymity:EFF is currently combating the growing practice of using the threat of unsubstantiated civil lawsuits to undermine the privacy rights of Internet users. Companies or individuals who want to know the identity of an anonymous Internet poster have begun serving legal documents on the poster's Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is then legally required to release the identity of the anonymous poster. Often, these posters are employee-whistleblowers who are posting anonymously for fear of losing their jobs. After forcing disclosure of the poster's identity, the company or individual then drops their spurious lawsuit, often firing the employee who did the posting. EFF has taken on several legal cases to quash such civil subpoenas because of the free speech implications of the cases. We believe that the people filing the lawsuit must show some sort of likelihood of winning the case on the merits before an ISP reveals the poster's identity. Along with our legal cases, we've created a campaign to educate ISPs on their rights and responsibilities in relation to civil subpoenas. Peer-to-Peer Technologies:EFF is concerned that the creators and developers of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have become music industry targets, especially in the wake of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal's Napster decision and the music industry's public vows to sue other P2P systems. Unfortunately, the recording industry has targeted the technology instead of the users who are actually violating their copyrights. Peer-to-peer technology is a wonderful tool for the mass distribution of all sorts of content. EFF believes that, in its zeal to stop illegal trading of copyrighted songs online, the music industry will cause significant damage to the developers of this new technology. We have begun meeting with P2P developers to discuss the possible legal challenges they may face. We have suggested methods for limiting legal liability, and we are preparing to defend them if the need should arise. Representing the Rights of People
Helping Others Know Their RightsEFF is committed to protecting users of new technologies. We see ourselves as being part of this community, and we believe it is our responsibility to be good electronic citizens. Working With Other GroupsEFF is a member of many organizations working to protect rights in the digital age, including the Internet Free Expression Alliance (IFEA), the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), the Digital Future Coalition (DFC), and the Free Expression Network (FEN). In addition, EFF tries to help local organizations throughout the world working on our issues. EFF also works with other groups sharing our concerns about civil liberties, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Public Citizen, the Online Policy Group (OPG), and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC). Bay Area EFF (BayFF)EFF presents monthly meetings to address important issues where technology and policy collide. These San Francisco Bay Area meetings, entitled, "BayFF," serve as a community forum, helping us to bring our work to those around us in a creative and personal way. BayFFs are also webcast in order to be available to the greater community. EFFectorEFF's biweekly electronic newsletter, EFFector, keeps readers informed of issues that are important to Internet users and tells them how they can participate. EFFector has been in publication for over a decade and has over 27,000 subscribers. Blue Ribbon Campaign:EFF created, sponsored and promotes the international grassroots Blue Ribbon Campaign opposing online censorship and protecting the essential human right of free speech embodied in the U.S. Bill of Rights and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE):CAFE is EFF's participatory project to thwart recording and movie industry attempts to seize control over MP3, DVD and other emerging digital media formats. CAFE engages and educates people on these issues. Through CAFE, we inform artists and others of their rights regarding electronic publication and copying. We are also in the process of creating a library of "open art licenses" that artists can use to authorize distribution of their works online. Brown Bag Lunches:EFF staff members take their expertise on the road by providing brown bag lunch speakers to local businesses, universities and civic organizations. Brown bag lunches give EFF staff members an opportunity to speak with members of the community and to inform them about areas in which we are working. This helps to garner support for our work. In addition, this provides a lively forum for hearing new ideas and topics that deserve our attention. Cooperative Computing Awards:EFF sponsors cooperative computing awards, with an endowment of over half a million dollars in prize money, to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving huge scientific problems. EFF will award prizes to the first individuals or groups that discover new prime numbers. EFF hopes to spur the technology of cooperative networking and encourage Internet users worldwide to join together in solving scientific problems involving massive computation. EFF was created to protect freedom in an increasingly digital world, and we have spent more than a decade fighting off threats to our rights. We cannot give up this fight. The cost to our humanity is too great. Join with us. As a donor-supported, nonprofit membership organization, EFF needs your help. Your generous gift can help us guarantee the best world we can imagine. Contact Us:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
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