The Electronic Frontier Foundation is about as inoffensive as groups on the Internet get. Their mission is to protect freedom of speech and civil liberties online, and get everybody on the Internet.
Unfortunately, being for free speech online often means they’re against various copyright trolls, so the EFF and their lawyers spend a lot of time dealing with the legal blackmail currently engaged in by the porn industry, wherein they find a few thousand people who downloaded some crappy clip, and send them “settlement letters,” i.e. give us a few thousand dollars, or we’ll tell everyone you watched “Gonzo Sorority Girls Bonefest MCLX”.
Needless to say, judges, as they’ve been informed of the issues, frown on these suits, so the shady lawyer stereotypes running these cases really hate when the EFF shows up, since they tend to inform the judges of the issues.
So their new solution is to go ballistic, apparently. In a recent case, the lawyers for the porn sleazeballs tried to play them off as a terrorist organization.
Seriously.
A few excerpts:
The EFF is an anti-intellectual property group, which appears in the present action merely in order to obstruct or delay Plaintiff’s copyright infringement litigation.
…the EFF’s proposed participation as amicus curiae is precisely the kind of “attempt[] to inject interest-group politics” into litigation…
This mission is radical, quasi-anarchist, and intrinsically opposed to any effective enforcement of intellectual property rights.
Unfortunately for these guys, they didn’t actually bother to, you know, address the arguments the EFF presented. This is a big legal no-no, so the radical quasi-anarchists are probably going to be allowed to weigh in on this particular extortion case. Too bad, porn guys! Maybe if you had a genuine case!
(Image via the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Flickr)
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Those people are clowns and liars and when a judge takes a look at some of the materials they’ve prepared that will become immediately obvious.
They write position papers on things that don’t exist, like the duty to monitor under SOPA that’s been clearly, explicitly, unequivocally addressed and disallowed in the bill since the beginning.
I know you want to like them because they tell you what you want to hear, but they’re scumbags and they’re doing a lot of damage to this country by crowding out critical thinking in favor of sensationalistic, reactionary nonsense.
First things first: what browser and OS are you running? Firefox became a complete disaster area for me about six months ago.
Secondly, wait, are you talking about the EFF, here?
I can see disagreeing with the EFF, but they aren’t hacks. There are a lot of respected tech folks and free speech lawyers working for them. They have a definite point of view, but they’re not clowns and liars, and in this particular case, the people they’re working against really are the scum of the earth.
Hmmm, I’ve never seen my virus protection go off on this computer. Happens every time I visit this page since I left my comment. Weird, huh?