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Tomorrow! Join Us For a Reddit AMA On Defending Security Researchers From Copyright Law Have you ever wanted to talk with the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the risks of talking in public about security issues, especially in connected Internet of Things devices? Tomorrow, you’ll get your chance . Information security has never been more important: now that everything from a car to a voting machine is just a computer in a fancy case, being able to tell the difference between secure systems and insecure ones is a literal life-or-death matter. But security researchers have never faced more threats. When security researchers divulge flaws in computers, the companies that make those computers are often tempted to shoot the messenger, threatening civil and criminal retaliation against their critics. Over the course of decades, short-sighted IT companies and federal prosecutors have twisted the law , especially a quasi-copyright law designed to prop up Digital Rights Management ...

IPR Process Saves 80 Companies From Paying For a Sports-Motion Patent The importance of the US Patent Office’s “inter partes review” (IPR) process was highlighted in dramatic fashion yesterday. Patent appeals judges threw out a patent [PDF] that was used to sue more than 80 companies in the fitness, wearables, and health industries. US Patent No. 7,454,002 was owned by Sportbrain Holdings, a company that advertised a kind of ‘smart pedometer’ as recently as 2011. But the product apparently didn’t take off, and in 2016, Sportbrain turned to patent lawsuits to make a buck. A company called Unified Patents challenged the ’002 patent by filing an IPR petition, and last year, the Patent Office agreed that the patent should be reviewed. Yesterday, the patent judges published their decision, canceling every claim of the patent. The ’002 patent describes capturing a user’s “personal data,” and then sharing that information with a wireless computing device and over a network. It then...