Does CISPA encourage corporate hacking?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:21:00 +0000

Could the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act unintentionally create a safe haven for corporate hacking?

Amidst all the clamour over what CIPSA means for civil liberties, with its emphasis on allowing tech companies and the government to more easily share information about Web users, there are cries of hypocrisy about those who'd be exempted from the potential new law.

Mark Jaycox of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes CIPSA, says language in the bill gives exempted companies too much leeway in deciding who can be labeled a cybersecurity threat and pursued with the new powers that would be granted by the legislation. Although an amendment added to the bill would limit companies' information gathering to their own networks, other parts of the bill would allow "wide ranging acts" to combat any potential cybersecurity threats.

When patent trolls attack

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:43:00 +0000

"The troubling trend of suing downstream users and content providers really makes us mad." That was the rallying cry Tuesday of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that calls itself the "first line of defense when our freedoms in the networked world come under attack." Specifically, the object of its scorn was a limited licensing company called Personal Audio, whose patent claim to podcasting technologies is the basis of lawsuits with such prominent podcasters as Adam Corolla's ACE Broadcasting Network and HowStuffWorks.com. More generally, the EFF's blog post served as a call to arms against a group sometimes called "patent trolls."

For every growing start-up flush with VC cash, there is an opportunistic NPE (non-practicing entity) hoping to capitalize on its success by enforcing patent claims for products or technologies it has no ultimate plan to manufacture. Often these claims are broad and malleable -- not unlike alleged troll Personal Audio's podcasting patent (to wit, an "apparatus for disseminating a series of episodes represented by media files via the Internet as said episodes become available").

Salon.com > Electronic Frontier Foundation

Does CISPA encourage corporate hacking?

When patent trolls attack