(Reproduced from the EFF's web site)

Email allows groups to grow from a dozen friends to a hundred hobbyists to a huge, national organization. Meanwhile, blogging is transforming journalism, and websites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are part of a new Library of Alexandria being built online.

In countless ways, the Internet is radically enhancing our access to information and empowering us to share ideas with the entire world. Speech thrives online, freed of limitations inherent in other media and created by traditional gatekeepers.

Preserving the Internet's open architecture is critical to sustaining free speech. But this technological capacity means little without sufficient legal protections. If laws can censor you, limit access to certain information, or restrict use of communication tools, then the Internet's incredible potential will go unrealized.

The government has time and again tried doing just that—indeed, censorship laws have often aimed at speech that could not be similarly restricted offline. And when old laws are not properly adapted to this medium, it's all too easy for the government, companies, and individual litigants to undermine your rights.

Imagine if you couldn't include excerpts from your sources in your research reports, or you couldn't include a quote from a politician in your editorial about an election. Despite strong legal protection for these types of activities, bogus copyright claims and other intellectual property threats can still have a chilling effect on speech.

For instance, only a year prior to the 2004 presidential elections, a group of students and activists published on the Internet internal memos suggesting that electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold knowingly distributed flawed e-voting machines. When Diebold used specious copyright claims to force people to take the memos down, EFF fought back—successfully defending the publishers and winning damages for copyright abuse.