As of today, we've now challenged six pending patent applications that you helped us identify as applications that, if granted, would particularly threaten the growing field of 3D printing technology. Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic hand delivered the first two submissions to the Patent Office earlier this year, and we've since sent in four more.

The prior art we’ve submitted so far thanks to your submissions ranges from patents and blog posts to research papers and symposium proceedings. Each prior art document gives the Patent Office tools to reject patent claims for obviousness. That in turn helps protect the diverse, exciting uses of 3D printing that are gaining in popularity each day, from small hobbyist printers to large-scale, high-quality commercial fabrication using materials ranging from titanium to chocolate.

Teenager Anthony Granville was arrested at his high school for a misdemeanor and booked into the county jail. All of his belongings, including his cell phone, were taken from him and placed in the jail's property room while he was locked up. Three hours after his arrest, a different officer than the one who arrested Granville at the high school went into the property room and, without a search warrant, looked through Granville's phone in search of evidence connected to another, unrelated felony.

The state appealed to the Texas Court of Appeals, arguing that Granville had no expectation of privacy in the contents of his cell phone while it was in the jailhouse, noting that looking through the phone was no different than looking at a person's clothes when they are booked into jail.

The appellate court disagreed with the government's analogy, finding the amount of information stored on mobile devices make a cell phone search far more invasive than a search of clothing.

In our amicus brief we explain the government had no excuse for not obtaining a warrant before searching Granville's phone. A person doesn't surrender their expectation of privacy in the contents of their phone once the phone is in the hands of jail officials. Plus none of the exceptions to the search warrant requirement applied. This wasn't a search "incident to arrest "since it took place hours after Granville was arrested, when the phone was out of his control. And it wasn't an "inventory search" because once the phone itself was inventoried and secured by the police, there was no need to inventory the data on the phone. Plus, an inventory search can't be used as a pretext for a clearly investigatory search, which this certainly was.

In the government’s view, visiting the URLs was an unauthorized access of AT&T’s website. But I think that’s wrong. At bottom, the conduct here was visiting a public website. As the Sixth Circuit stated in Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers’ International Union Of North America, 648 F.3d 295 (6th Cir. 2011), everyone is authorized to visit an “unprotected website” that is “open to the public.” The fact that AT&T would not have wanted Spitler to visit those particular URLs doesn’t make visiting the public website and collecting the information a criminal unauthorized access. If you make information available to the public with the hope that only some people would bother to look, it’s not a crime for other people to see what you make available to them.

Unauthorized access is ordinarily a misdemeanor. Why is this crime a felony? Here’s the government’s remarkable theory. All 50 states have state unauthorized access computer crime statutes similar to the federal unauthorized access statute. The government’s theory is that this overlap turns essentially all federal CFAA misdemeanors into federal felonies. They rely on 18 U.S.C. 1030(C)(2)(B)(ii), which states that a misdemeanor unauthorized access becomes a felony when it is “in furtherance of any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State.” The government argues that the existence of state unauthorized access crimes transform unauthorized access misdemeanor crimes into felonies: The overlap means that every federal unauthorized access crime is a federal crime “in furtherance of” the analogous state crime.

The largest part of Auernheimer’s sentence was due to an alleged $73,000 in loss suffered by AT&T. Under the provisions of the Sentencing Guidelines associated with 18 U.S.C. 1030, sentences are based primarily on the amount of loss caused by the crime. More dollar loss to the victim means more time in prison for the defendant.

First, AT&T notified its customers by e-mail. That was free, leading to a “cost” so far of zero. But then AT&T decided to follow-up the e-mail notification with paper letter notification, and the postage and paper costs amounted to about $73,000.

1. A patent covering software should be shorter: no more than five years from the application date.
2. If the patent is invalid or there's no infringement, the trolls should have to pay the legal fees.
3. Patent applicants should be required to provide an example of running software code for each claim in the patent.
4. Infringers should avoid liability if they independently arrive at the patented invention.
5. Patents and licenses should be public right away. Patent owners should be required to keep their public records up-to-date.
6. The law should limit damages so that a patent owner can't collect millions if the patent represented only a tiny fraction of a defendant's product.
7. Congress should commission a study and hold hearings to examine whether software patents actually benefit our economy at all.

Regardless of whether you think software patents should be abolished altogether or just reformed, the first step is recognizing that a one-size-fits-all patents system doesn’t make sense and that we need to treat software patents differently from other types of patents. Without that, no effort – whether reform or abolition – can be successful.

“It’s really quite outrageous, frankly... I was thinking the government hadn’t learned to be discreet in its conduct in the digital world. This is a perfect example on how they are failing to apply traditional standards in the new context.”

“That’s a dangerous road,” Sofaer said.

He suggested that the government hasn’t quite caught up to the digital age. He doubts the government would take the same position with a bank it seized.

“Of course they would help customers get back their deposits,” he said. “But think about this new world. You can see very clearly that the government is acting in a manner that is indiscriminate.”

We think it’s pretty clear that the samples the Beastie Boys used in Paul’s Boutique and that Girl Talk now uses in his records are classic examples of fair use. Unfortunately, many artists these days are nonetheless under pressure to pay licensing fees for similar uses. Despite the fact that most cases rightfully find that sampling is not copyright infringement, the mere threat of a lawsuit (and the specter of statutory damages) is enough to intimidate musicians and labels alike. This cottage market of sample licensing stands in the way of creating the next Paul's Boutique – a sad comment on MCA's legacy.

The time to come up with a new, effective licensing scheme is long overdue. Young artists should be encouraged to remix and create in all the exciting new ways that technology allows, not sidelined by expensive licensing battles. Solving this problem would go a long way in that direction and be a fitting tribute to MCA, the Beastie Boys, and the fantastic remix culture they helped foster.

Government networks are protected by a network security system called Einstein, which is being steadily expanded to do things like analyze the content of communications. Such software meets all the criteria of a "cybersecurity system" under CISPA, and there is serious concern that the bill would permit the government to offer Einstein or a similar system to private cybersecurity companies. By CISPA's definitions, everything collected by such a system would qualify as "cyber threat information" and thus be open game for sharing with the government—and nothing in the bill would prevent these private systems from being connected live to government databases, effectively uniting them with the government's own security network.

Yes, it would still be voluntary—the government couldn't force a cybersecurity provider to install their software, and the provider would need to get permission from its clients to share the data. But it's not hard to envision a situation developing very quickly, in which the government gets a few major security players hooked up and their clients routinely agree without a second thought. After all, CISPA's extremely limited liability provisions mean there's little to no risk for companies. Some may question whether the government would actually move in this direction under CISPA, but given the fact that the NSA has been trying to expand Einstein to private networks since the Bush administration, giving them the legal ability to do so is a very bad idea.

Through a careful comparison of thousands of pages of documents we received from this FOIA request with the same documents we received from an earlier FOIA request, we found that redactions in many of these duplicated documents were strikingly different. In several cases, the FBI redacted more information in later-produced documents than it did in earlier-produced documents. In other cases, the FBI redacted differing amounts of information when it produced two copies of the same report in response to the same FOIA request. Sometimes the agency blocked out whole paragraphs, while at other times it blocked out only the key words that explain the details of its acts. What is interesting is that the FBI claimed the same FOIA exemptions in each version; it just applied them differently.

"If you asked [U.S. residents] whether the government has a right to open their laptops, read their documents and e-mails, look at their photographs, and examine the Web sites they have visited, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing, I think those same Americans would say that the government has absolutely no right to do that. And if you asked him whether that actually happens, they would say, 'not in the United States of America.'"