A U.S. District Court Judge has reversed his own ruling in a legal battle between the RIAA and a couple it had sued for copyright infringement in 2006. The RIAA sued Pamela and Jeffery Howell over their use of the Kazaa file sharing software, which allowed copyrighted songs to be made available for sharing online. According to CNet, Jeffery Howell said he had ripped songs from his own CDs, but not placed the tracks in the shared folder, nor had he downloaded them using Kazaa. Howell also argued that the computer was technically sharing the songs, not him.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Fred von Lohmann described the order as the "most decisive rejection yet of the recording industry's 'making available' theory of infringement," according to CNet.

Pennsylvania's chief liquor regulator says a plan to offer wine in up to 100 free-standing kiosks in grocery stores is part of the state's ongoing attempt to modernize the way it sells alcohol.

But public health advocates said Tuesday they're concerned about whether the state would be able to keep the wine out of the hands of underage drinkers.

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"One of the things to keep in mind: Do you really want to hand over more information to the government? And who else would be able to have access to it? How will they secure it?" asked Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco.

"Would you really want a record of how often you buy alcohol?" she asked.

The Bush administration is refusing to disclose internal e-mails, letters and notes showing contacts with major telecommunications companies over how to persuade Congress to back a controversial surveillance bill, according to recently disclosed court documents.

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The existence of these documents surfaced only in recent days as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The foundation (alerted to the issue in part by a NEWSWEEK story last fall) is seeking information about communications among administration officials, Congress and a battery of politically well-connected lawyers and lobbyists hired by such big telecom carriers as AT&T and Verizon. Court papers recently filed by government lawyers in the case confirm for the first time that since last fall unnamed representatives of the telecoms phoned and e-mailed administration officials to talk about ways to block more than 40 civil suits accusing the companies of privacy violations because of their participation in a secret post-9/11 surveillance program ordered by the White House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday approved legislation that seeks to clarify the rules governing the disclosure of state secrets in the courtroom. The bill's chief sponsor, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), has touted the legislation as a response to President Bush's aggressive invocation of the state secret privilege in litigation challenging the conduct of the "war on terror." The 11-8 vote was almost entirely along party lines, with only Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) breaking ranks to vote in favor of the bill.

The state secrets privilege has been at the heart of the wiretapping cases that we have covered here at Ars. Back in 2006, the Bush administration intervened in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T, arguing that the litigation could not be conducted fairly because any information about the NSA's "secret room" would be classified. The administration made the same argument in its effort to stop five state regulatory agencies from probing telco participation in the NSA programs. And the government invoked the state secrets doctrine in defending itself from a lawsuit brought by an Islamic charity that claims it was the target of an illegal wiretap.

In a decision that could anger some privacy advocates, a US appeals court said that border and airport security agents can search laptops without cause.

Surprisingly, the unanimous 3-0 decision came from the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, which has otherwise been a target of criticism for its alleged liberal bias.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of Arnold's case, disagreed that laptop searches were any different from other common border searches.

"Fourth Amendment law constrains police from conducting arbitrary searches, implements respect for social privacy norms, and seeks to maintain traditional privacy rights in the face of technological changes," EFF civil liberties director Jennifer Granic said. "This Arnold opinion fails to protect travelers in these traditional Fourth Amendment ways."

A court ruling in New Jersey this week stating that Web users have an expectation of privacy in their Internet activity and IP addresses is being viewed as a new milestone in the effort to define what constitutes personal information.

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The ruling seems to signal that the court is concerned about privacy erosion in a society where data is increasingly stored digitally. Lee Tien, a lawyer with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the holding a "harbinger of a trend" toward protecting online privacy. That organization, along with the ACLU, Electronic Privacy Information Center and others, filed a friend of the court brief in the case.

U.S. House Republicans are circulating a petition to force a new vote on legal immunity for telcos that aided government electronic surveillance.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the co-lead counsel in many of the civil cases, maintains that the carriers broke the law by providing the National Security Agency with the full content of billions of e-mails, text messages and VOIP (voice over IP) calls. The EFF says it is an issue for the courts to decide.

When Tanya Andersen opens the door to her modest apartment in suburban Portland, Ore., her Maltese-terrier mix, Tazz, runs over and wags his tail in a friendly hello. The 45-year-old single mother doesn't seem like much of a fighter. She spends most of her days sitting on an overstuffed sofa with a heating pad behind her back to ease chronic pain and migraines that have kept her on disability for nearly five years. Her voice is soft and halting. Yet this woman is behind a fierce assault on the music industry and its tactics for combating music piracy on the Internet. "I've just got to keep doing what I believe is right," she says, with Tazz curled up next to her on the couch. "And that's fighting and letting people know what's happening."

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While the recording industry has gone after thousands of people, Andersen is unusual. Of the 40,000 people the RIAA says it has targeted for legal action, at most 100 have decided to defend themselves in court, says Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. Few want to pay the legal costs of fighting the music industry, so most settle cases quickly, even if they believe they're innocent. Of the people who defend themselves, only a handful have taken the next step of suing the record industry for their lawyers' fees, and only a couple have won reimbursement. Andersen, one of the few winners on all counts, is the first to file a broad lawsuit that has put the RIAA on the defensive.

Verizon continues to insist that its wireless network will soon be open.

Yesterday at Sofcon, a Silicon Valley conference dedicated to "The Mobile Future", everyone from New York Times columnist David Pogue to Nokia CTO Bob Iannucci took a swipe at the big-name wireless carriers, accusing these closed-minded giants of shamelessly stifling America's wireless industry.

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But John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, remains unconvinced. Speaking after Brigner, he continued to question whether Verizon and its telco buddies have turned the corner.

"In the wireless market, vendors talk about producing trends by putting in 'sticky' services - i.e. ways to lock their customers in - as opposed to offering them ways to do whatever they want on the network," he said. "I'm expecting that you're going to see a lot of mobile access through networks that aren't run by carriers."

Steve Wozniak built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist's urge to share information and the industrialist's incentive to earn a profit.

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Moreover, there is also a range of smaller organizations, like the Internet Archive in San Francisco, with smaller but sustainable revenue streams. Significantly, an ecosystem is emerging that involves support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provides legal services, and the Internet Systems Consortium, which plays the role of an independent Internet service provider for the community.

A non-profit open source project with high-profile backers has released beta code for an open source Flash media player, with a media server in the wings. Open Media Now's Gnash player runs standalone or as a plugin, and may run better than Flash on constrained devices.

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OMNow is dedicated to the "development, the support, and the empowerment of an open media infrastructure," says the Foundation, which is seeking corporate members to help support the Gnash and Cygnal free software projects. The group is also said to collaborate closely with other nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), which is seeding low-cost Linux laptops in developing nations.

Missteps by Federal Bureau of Investigation officials caused delays in the investigation of a man initially linked to the 2005 London subway bombings, but bureau officials blamed the slowdown on restrictions to their subpoena power, according to email records.

The FBI documents, released Monday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, describe a series of miscues by FBI officials as agents in Raleigh, N.C., tried to obtain records for a former university student who investigators initially thought had ties to the London bombers. The missteps appear to have delayed the investigation by a day or two, according to the emails.

Craigslist is defending itself against charges by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal that solicitations for prostitution are "rampant" on its Web site and demanding that Blumenthal retract statements it says are defamatory.

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But the court said the Communications Decency Act protects Web sites from liability for third-party postings. It's the latest in a series of similar rulings.

A staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kurt Opsahl, said the ruling was "good news."

The protection provided by the law is essential to the Internet's free operation, he said.

Steve Wozniak built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit.

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Moreover, there is also a range of smaller organizations, like the Internet Archive in San Francisco, with smaller but sustainable revenue streams. Significantly, an ecosystem is emerging that involves support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provides legal services, and the Internet Systems Consortium, which plays the role of an independent Internet service provider for the community.

Tossing it like a Frisbee is OK. The kids, cat and dog scratching the hell out of it is just fine.

But throwing away that CD is copyright infringement.

According to UMG Recordings, that's true insofar as the label's promotional CDs are concerned: those thousands of unaccounted for discs the label mails out each year to reviewers, radio stations and others.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is defending the accused pirate.

"According to the first sale doctrine, once a copyright owner has parted with ownership of a CD, book, or DVD, whether by sale, gift, or other disposition, they may not control further dispositions of that particular copy (including throwing it away)," EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann wrote on his blog. "It's thanks to the first sale doctrine that libraries can lend books, video rental stores can rent DVDs, and you can give a CD to a friend for their birthday. It's also the reason you can throw away any CD that you own."

Two weeks after Attorney General Michael Mukasey tearfully told a San Francisco audience the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to wiretap a phone call from Afghanistan, the Justice Department is still trying to explain what he meant, and a congressional leader is demanding answers.

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But the executive order would have allowed the government to wiretap such a call, said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group representing phone customers who have sued over the surveillance program. He noted that the order allowed intercepting calls to the United States if the attorney general had probable cause to believe the U.S. recipient was a terrorist - a standard that easily could have been met, Opsahl said, for any message from an al Qaeda safe house.

The European Parliament on Thursday urged governments not to authorise shut-off of internet access in cases of suspected copyright piracy. The subject of the vote, an own-initiative report on promoting European cultural industries by French Socialist Parliament Member (MEP) Guy Bono, has stirred up a hornet’s nest of debate over the liability of internet service providers for online infringement.

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Lawmakers clearly rejected graduated response as a solution to internet piracy, said Erik Josefsson, Electronic Frontier Foundation European affairs coordinator. Other solutions are in the pipeline, including voluntary licensing and new business models for remuneration of content owners, he said. There is a great deal of creativity everywhere but with the major rights-holders associations, Josefsson said.

Time Warner Cable says access to a Web site that has been posting blog entries about an officer-involved shooting in Oceanside was temporarily inaccessible to its subscribers because of technical problems and wasn't intentionally blocked.

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Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet free-speech and privacy advocacy organization, said information posted on badcopnews.com seemed to rule out that a firewall had blocked the site and was “somewhat consistent with Time Warner's explanation.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest filed briefs in federal court Monday on behalf of eBay seller Troy Augusto, defending his right to resell promotional CDs ("promo" CDs) that he buys from secondhand stores in the Los Angeles area.

Augusto, who does business as "Roast Beast Music" on eBay, was sued in May 2007 by Universal Music Group (UMG), the largest record company in the world, for 26 eBay auction listings involving UMG promo CDs. At issue is whether the "promotional use only, not for resale" labels on these CDs can trump a consumer's right to resell copyrighted materials that they own, guaranteed by copyright law's "first sale" doctrine.

When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect's telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.

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Since a 1994 law required telecoms to build electronic interception capabilities into their systems, the FBI has created a network of links between the nation's largest telephone and Internet firms and about 40 FBI offices and Quantico, according to interviews and documents describing the agency's Digital Collection System. The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco that specializes in digital-rights issues.

Boston University students have won what one lawyer hailed as a "David and Goliath" victory after challenging one of the recording industry's most aggressive tactics: lawsuits targeting people who illegally download music.

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The decision adds a layer of protection for the thousands of people, many of them students, sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, according to Fred von Lohmann, staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in support of the BU students.

"It does not mean the end of the issue," von Lohmann said. "It is not going to slow down the RIAA litigation machine, and they'll continue to sue hundreds a month all over the country. But the judge said they have more work to do if they want to prove these cases."

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

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Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today's more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television.

"CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window," he explained. "To make matters worse, you'd have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn't necessarily be good for our mental health."