The Electronic Frontier Foundation will award Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the ‘pirate’ library Sci-Hub, for her efforts to provide access to scientific knowledge. According to EFF, Elbakyan’s site is a vital resource for millions of students and researchers. Some medical professionals have even argued that the site helped to save lives.
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce that Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal Foundation will receive the 2023 EFF Awards for their vital work in helping to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people….
Kazakhstani computer programmer Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011 to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge. Launched as a tool for providing quick access to articles from scientific journals, Sci-Hub has grown a database of more than 88.3 million research articles and books freely accessible for anyone to read and download; much of this knowledge otherwise would be hidden behind paywalls. Sci-Hub is used by millions of students, researchers, medical professionals, journalists, inventors, and curious people all over the world, many of whom provide feedback saying they are grateful for this access to knowledge. Some medical professionals have said Sci-Hub helps save human lives; some students have said they wouldn’t be able to complete their education without Sci-Hub’s help. Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment. She has been targeted by many lawsuits and government actions, and Sci-Hub is blocked in some countries, yet she still stands tall for the idea that restricting access to information and knowledge violates human rights….”
“The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF, which used this process to fight the Personal Audio “podcasting patent,” from filing patent challenges altogether.
We need EFF supporters to speak out against this proposal, which is a gift for patent trolls….”
“Yesterday, we wrote about the importance of fair use as a safeguard for free expression. But all too often, fair use and other legal limits on copyright are not enough to stop copyright enforcement from serving as cover for silencing critics.
Time and again, we see copyright claims getting textbook fair uses erased from the internet, taking particular advantage of the Digital Millenium Copyright’s (DMCA) takedown regime. One culprit, the ironically named No Evil Foods, went after journalists and podcasters who reported on accusations of union-busting, claiming copyright in a union organizer’s recordings of anti-union presentations by management….”
“Last year there were a bevy of bad copyright and copyright-related proposals in the U.S. Because thousands of you spoke up, none of them made it into the year-end, must-pass bills in Congress.
But this week isn’t just about stopping bad proposals. It’s about celebrating positive changes for all of us. It’s about right to repair, fair use, and the public domain….”
“EFF client Internet Archive has created one of those spaces. Through Controlled Digital Lending (“CDL”), the Internet Archive and other nonprofit libraries make and lend digital scans of print books in their collections, at no cost to their patrons. CDL allows people to check out digital copies of books for two weeks or less, and only permits patrons to check out as many copies as the Archive and its partner libraries physically own. That means that if the Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like any other library. Through CDL, the Internet Archive is helping to foster research and learning by helping its patrons access books and by keeping books in circulation when their publishers have lost interest in them….
If the publishers have their way, however, books, like an increasing amount of other copyrighted works, will only be rented, never owned, available subject to the publishers’ whim, on their terms. This is not a hypothetical problem, as students at Georgetown, George Washington University, and the other members of the Washington Research Library Consortium learned last fall when they discovered that found 1,379 books could no longer be borrowed in electronic form….”
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with co-counsel Durie Tangri, is defending the Internet Archive against a lawsuit that threatens its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program.
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library, preserving and providing access to cultural artifacts of all kinds in electronic form. CDL allows people to check out digital copies of books for two weeks or less, and only permits patrons to check out as many copies as the Archive and its partner libraries physically own. That means that if the Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like any other library. Through CDL, the Internet Archive is helping to foster research and learning by helping its patrons access books and by keeping books in circulation when their publishers have lost interest in them.
Four publishers sued the Archive, alleging that CDL violates their copyrights. In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House claim CDL has cost their companies millions of dollars and is a threat to their businesses.
They are wrong….”
“As part of its ongoing work to ensure that people can know and understand the laws they live under, Public.Resource.org, a nonprofit organization, on Thursday vindicated its ability to publicly post important laws online in standard formats, free of copy protections and cumbersome user interfaces.
The win for Public Resource—represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with co-counsel Fenwick & West and David Halperin—in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia reinforces the critical idea that our laws belong to all of us, and we should be able to find, read, and comment on them free of registration requirements, fees, and other roadblocks….”
“EFF is standing with a huge coalition of organizations to urge Congress to oppose the Online Content Policy Modernization Act (OCPMA, S. 4632). Introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the OCPMA is yet another of this year’s flood of misguided attacks on Internet speech (read bill [pdf]). The bill would make it harder for online platforms to take common-sense moderation measures like removing spam or correcting disinformation, including disinformation about the upcoming election. But it doesn’t stop there: the bill would also upend longstanding balances in copyright law, subjecting ordinary Internet users to up to $30,000 in fines for everyday activities like sharing photos and writing online, without even the benefit of a judge and jury….”
“EFF is standing with a huge coalition of organizations to urge Congress to oppose the Online Content Policy Modernization Act (OCPMA, S. 4632). Introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the OCPMA is yet another of this year’s flood of misguided attacks on Internet speech (read bill [pdf]). The bill would make it harder for online platforms to take common-sense moderation measures like removing spam or correcting disinformation, including disinformation about the upcoming election. But it doesn’t stop there: the bill would also upend longstanding balances in copyright law, subjecting ordinary Internet users to up to $30,000 in fines for everyday activities like sharing photos and writing online, without even the benefit of a judge and jury….”
“The public’s right of access to court proceedings is well-established as a legal principle, but it needs constant defending. In part, that’s because private parties keep asking publicly-funded courts to resolve their disputes in secret. As we and others have written before, this problem is especially great in patent cases, where parties on opposite sides of a case often agree with each other to keep as much of the litigation as possible hidden from view. That deprives the public of material it has every right to see that could affect its rights to engage, like documents establishing (or undermining) a patent owner’s right to bring suit on the basis of a patent which they claim to own….
The Federal Circuit’s decision is a victory for the public, which has waited far too long to see court records to which it has a strong presumption of rightful access. It is also a defeat for Uniloc, which tried, but failed, to avoid the default rule of public access throughout these proceedings. We hope this outcome sends a strong message to Uniloc and other patent litigants that their preference for secrecy cannot overcome the public’s right to know what happens in our courts.”
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining forces with the law firm of Durie Tangri to defend the Internet Archive against a lawsuit that threatens their Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program, which helps people all over the world check out digital copies of books owned by the Archive and its partner libraries….”
“On behalf of the undersigned national and regional library, research, publishing, and advocacy organizations, we are writing to express our commitment to ensuring that American taxpayers are guaranteed immediate, free, and unfettered access to the results of scientific research that their tax dollars support, and to encourage the Administration to support continued progress towards this shared goal. We strongly endorse updating existing U.S. policy to eliminate the current 12-month embargo period on articles reporting on publicly funded research, and to ensure that they are made immediately available under terms and conditions that allow their full reuse. To unlock the full value of our collective investment in science, the underlying data needed to validate an article’s conclusions, along with any corresponding software or code, should also be made immediately available….”