Forbes’s Carol Pinchefsky profiles “4 Public Interest Groups Who Are Fighting for Your Digital Freedom” including EFF, Public Knowledge, TechFreedom and the Center for Democracy and Technology. It’s a great cross-section of the different approaches that activist groups take to technology and freedom (but I would lobby for the inclusion of some of the newer groups, like AmericanCensorship.org and DemandProgress.org, who were so key to the SOPA/PIPA fight). This is part one, focusing on Public Knowledge and EFF.
Cohn said, “We continue to battle the warrantless wiretapping that was started by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration. The administration has been trying to avoid a court looking at what they’re doing by hiding behind the state’s secrets privilege, so we’ve had to have a lot of fights around that.”
Among other battles, the EFF is fighting copyright trolls, people who “use copyright claims to try to shake down people. The business model is not about the lawsuit, it’s about the strategy of extracting money.” For example, Camelot Distribution Group blanketed the users of a peer-to-peer downloading site with threatening letters, claiming that the users illegally downloaded the “nunsploitation” movie, Nude Nuns with Big Guns.
According to Cohn, Camelot Distribution Group told users, “You can pay us a thousand dollars and this whole thing will go away.” She said, “People feel intimidated by this, whether or not they did it, because even if they fight this and they’re exonerated, they’re going to be forever linked to Nude Nuns with Big Guns.”
Worse, the lawsuits are usually created in locations that are geographically undesirable for the defendants, which makes it hard for them to defend themselves. Cohn said, “We’ve been filing amicus briefs and getting appointed by courts across the country to defend these people and to develop some processes that is more fair than the trolls want to do it.”
4 Public Interest Groups Who Are Fighting for Your Digital Freedom (part 1)
(Thanks, Carol!)