Defending liberties in high-tech world

That focus has left the group open to criticisms that by refusing to play the Washington game of compromising, its views are idealistic and sometimes extremist.

"They are the lawyers for the open vision of the Internet," said Peter Swire, the Clinton administration privacy counselor who sometimes tussled with the EFF. "They are the Left Coast advocacy group."

Companies targeted by the EFF say the group appears overly skeptical of intellectual property and the free market.

Paul Ryan, whose Acacia Research Corp. the EFF cited for "crimes against the public domain" for claiming patents on streaming media, said the EFF ignores the fact that without patent protection, companies have less incentive to innovate.

The EFF also has faced criticisms that, despite its many victories, its losses can establish legal precedents that make subsequent cases harder to win. In the file-sharing case, the EFF won twice in lower courts, but the Supreme Court narrowed a 1984 ruling that technology shouldn't automatically be barred because it had illegal uses.

"The decision to expend energy on cases and in some sense to work to get them to the Supreme Court is to really gamble with the outcome," said Danny Weitzner, who left EFF in 1994 to help form the rival CDT.

He said the EFF should have waited for a better case, so that the high court wouldn't be "deciding about whether kids could steal music."

EFF attorneys say that they can't always wait for the perfect case and could at least prevent a worse ruling.

Others say that by refusing to take risks, no rights will be left.

"People will always second guess what you do," said Lee Tien, an EFF attorney active in the AT&T lawsuit. "If you're going to be afraid to complain about something wrong, you deserve to have wrongdoing done to you."

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