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It's no secret that I'm often skeptical of antitrust actions, many of which feel like bureaucrats doing a general punishment" for disliking a successful company, rather than an actual response to abusive, anti-competitive behavior by a large company. However, that does not mean that there is no place for antitrust enforcement. It's just that it [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. While it didn't get much hype, that's a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle to adoption due to muted competition and high service prices. But [...]

Usually when we discuss trademark disputes, we tend to highlight examples and stories where the dispute is initiated by a party where we really, really don't think they have much of a leg to stand on. This story is different in that respect. In India, an eBike company called Yulu has sued a company called [...]

Amazon's home surveillance tech acquisition, Ring, wanted to be all things to everyone. But mostly, it wanted to be BFFs with law enforcement. Providing homeowners with an easy way to surveil their own doorsteps and driveways was enough for Ring for a little while. Then, following its acquisition by Amazon, it began to portray itself [...]

Anyone who follows Techdirt knows we're very interested in the progress of Bluesky, the decentralized social network that embraces our concept of protocols over platforms. Bluesky recently ended its invite-only beta and opened its doors to the public, so it seems like a great time for a check-in, and who better to check in with [...]

A few weeks ago, Prof. James Grimmelmann and (former Techdirt) journalist Tim Lee wrote a piece for Ars Technica, stating why the NY Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. It's no secret that I'm skeptical of the underpinnings of the lawsuit and think the NY Times is being silly in filing it, but [...]

Like highway patrol officers bitching about the fact they couldn't talk a driver into a voluntary search, a British censorship board is complaining about the fact they can't get US companies to comply with takedown requests they're under no legal obligation to comply with. That's the gist of this article, as reported by Laurie Clarke [...]

The Apple Watch Wireless Charger Keychain is the perfect accessory for Apple Watch users on-the-go. With a built-in 950mAh lithium-ion battery, it can charge all series of Apple Watch. The technology allows it to be used as a base for a bedside table or table for convenient charging. Its portable, pocket-size design makes it easy [...]

It appears that Meta is serious about no longer bribing news orgs to keep corrupt politicians from forcing them to engage in sketchy wealth transfer schemes to news orgs. While it caved in the past in Australia and paid off news orgs there, the company is informing news orgs that they won't be renewing the [...]

We've noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate AI" into journalism have proven to be acomical mess, resulting in no shortage ofshoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It's thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and [...]

While I'm mildly surprised by this, at least it's a pleasant surprise. Almost exactly a year ago rapper Eminem opposed the trademark for the Reasonably Shady" podcast, which is itself a product of Gizelle Bryant and Robyn Dixon, both of whom were on Real Houswives of Potomac. The opposition itself is quite silly, with Em's [...]

The leader in gunshot detection tech rebranded recently. Following several months of sustained negative press, ShotSpotter decided it wanted to be called something else: SoundThinking. But a raffelesia by any other name smells the same. ShotSpotter had experienced a bit of quick uptake by law enforcement agencies, but in recent years, it was more well-known [...]

Republican state Rep. Jamie Gragg of Ozark is a freshman lawmaker with no discernible accomplishments on his record. However, it isn't to say that the man doesn't break from the party line when it comes to the Republican Party's fascistic campaign against transgender rights. Gragg introduced House Bill (HB) 2885. It makes it a sex [...]

Do you remember Irell & Manella? Of course you do. It's the formerly well-respected law firm that once brought a lawsuit on behalf of PETA claiming (incorrectly) to represent a monkey, which it claimed (incorrectly) could hold a copyright. As we noted at the time, the whole reason that a respected firm like Irell would [...]

Courtesy of Solar Opposites (imho the funniest show on streaming TV), here's what happens when you teach a cop how to read: To quote the relevant part for those who can't view the video or would just prefer me to put my cop-hating in plain text, here it is. Yumyulack, an alien, is trying to [...]

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I had thought that maybe, just maybe, now that DeSantis had dropped out of the Presidential race, maybe (just maybe?) he'd stop pushing blatantly unconstitutional laws. That's not to say that DeSantis has any good ideas. But it felt like over the last few years, he really leaned into the nonsense culture wars in an [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to a complaint about Biden sinking the ship of the US: Racking up the votes for second place, it's an anonymous comment about lessons from the Vice Media collapse: That's the root of 90% of our problems as a nation. Quarter-to-quarter [...]

Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we'll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we're kicking things off with the [...]

Usually when you hear the term trademark bully" tossed around, it's done so either by members of the media, such as us here at Techdirt, or by defense attorneys making a point before the court. In the case of The Florida Virtual School, however, that moniker was given to the company by the judge that [...]

Going way, way back, we've talked about the need for protection of journalistic sources, in particular the need for a federal journalism shield law. I can find stories going back about 15 years of us talking about it here on Techdirt. The issue might not come up that often, but that doesn't make it any [...]

As the Vice collapse and Messenger collapse just got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn't that it's not inherently profitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the media companies they acquire and operate like [...]

We have pointed out just how ridiculous Elon Musk's SLAPP lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate is, so much that I supported the filing of an amicus brief in support of CCDH, even as I find CCDH's positions and research to be generally problematic and misleading. But, even if their research methods aren't [...]

There are a variety of reasons to alter, if not actually end, the Section 702 collection. Whatever value it may have in terms of national security, the very real fact is that it has been endlessly abused by the FBI since its inception. It's a foreign-facing collection, which means it harvests communications and data involving [...]

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At the Supreme Court's oral arguments about Florida and Texas' social media content moderation laws, there was a fair bit of talk about Section 230. As we noted at the time, a few of the Justices (namely Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) seemed confused about Section 230 and also about what role (if any) it [...]

So we've noted for a long while that the fixation on China and TikTok specifically has often been used by some lazy thinkers (like the FCC's Brendan Carr) as a giant distraction from the fact the U.S. has proven too corrupt to regulate data brokers, or even to pass a baseline privacy law for the [...]

Full disclosure as a matter of throat-clearing: I generally like BrewDog, a brewery based in the UK. Between really enjoying their beer in the past and the fact that the company underwent a concerted effort to change its previously draconian stance on IP issues, the company has just generally rubbed me the right way, so [...]

Very rarely do you see anyone prevail in court when any form of forfeiture is in play. The forfeiture litigation deck is firmly stacked in favor of the government, which rarely needs anything approaching actual proof to walk off with someone's property. It's even more rare to see someone awarded damages in a civil lawsuit [...]

Much like the phrase smart technology," the word security" just doesn't mean what it used to. Case in point: last September, owners of Wyze smart home security cameras" were informed at the company's forums that the company had crossed some wires in the backend," resulting in a glitch that allowed 2,300 users to see the [...]

Politics is messy, and you get the feeling that a lot of internet companies want nothing to do with politics" of any kind. Back in 2019 Twitter (when it was still Twitter) decided to ban all political ads, a near-impossible task guaranteed to make a mess of things (such as banning get out the vote" [...]

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At the start of this year, for the sixth time in a row, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Once again, we got a whole bunch of fantastic entries making use of newly public domain materials to create games of all types. And now it's time [...]

I know people are bored to death after years of infighting over net neutrality. But the FCC's attempts to impose something vaguely resembling oversight upon a bunch of shitty regional telecom monopolies that have bludgeoned U.S. broadband into uncompetitive rubble still matters, no matter how tired the press and public might be of the debate, [...]

The mess is getting a little messier. We had talked days ago about Sony's decision to shutter its Funimation platform in favor of a more recent acquisition in Crunchyroll. Anyone with a Funimation account would be transitioned into a Crunchyroll account, which sounds all good until you realize that Funimation users had plenty of digital [...]

No matter how minor the infraction, it still deserves the court's full attention. That's the ultimate lesson of this New York court decision, brought to us by FourthAmendment.com. It starts with an alleged window tint violation (always a favorite of cops on fishing expedition), morphs into a fire hydrant parking violation, and finally ends with [...]

With the UK moving forward with its plans for an online porn license" for anyone to view adult content online, and with various state legislatures pushing to effectively require the same in the US, this dumb and counterproductive idea is proving quite popular among the political class. Thankfully, not in Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin [...]

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub and some of the most popular adult film studios and premium porn websites. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Aylo (formerly MindGeek) maintains a global media empire of adult sites. Paxton makes clear in a press release that the lawsuit aims to enforce a [...]

As Mike already noted, the weirdest moment of the nearly four-hour, double-case hearing at the Supreme Court on Monday in the NetChoice and CCIA legal challenges of Florida's and Texas's social media laws came maybe two thirds into the oral argument, when Justice Alito openly wondered, If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it [...]

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Soon after Elon took over Twitter and brought with him a sink-shaped wrecking ball, we wrote a story wondering if there was anyone left at the company who remembered that the company had a consent decree with the FTC that required it to take certain steps to make sure private info was not revealed to [...]

Last month you probably sawthe storyabout how somebody used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn't particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact. But it clearly [...]

For quite some time now we've been pointing out the many harms of age verification technologies, and how they're a disaster for privacy. In particular, we've noted that if you have someone collecting biometric information on people, that data itself becomes a massive risk since it will be targeted. And, remember, a year and a [...]

Like most tech, facial recognition AI continues to become cheaper and easier to implement. Is it getting better? Well, that hardly seems to be a primary concern for those deploying it. Adoption of this tech tends to focus on the law enforcement side of things. This is where it seems to perform worse. The tech [...]

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments over both Florida and Texas' social media content moderation laws. Even though the issues were similar, and the parties challenging both laws (NetChoice and CCIA) were the same (and had the same lawyer, Paul Clement, argue both cases), the laws are somewhat different, and so each [...]

Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly named Piracy Shield". This is Italy's new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the copyright industry a disproportionate power to control what is available online, no court orders required. Piracy Shield wentlive in December, and has just issued itsfirst blocking [...]

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Earlier this year, we wrote about outspoken financier Bill Ackman's threat to sue Business Insider over articles regarding accusations by the publication that Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, had plagiarized parts of her dissertation years ago. The timeline and context of what happened here is important because Ackman continues to ignore it. Ackman got upset about [...]