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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 [...]

As we survey the rubble that once was the U.S. journalism industry, a common refrain involves lamenting that online journalism just isn't profitable." But as the recent collapse of outlets like Sports Illustrated and The Messenger illustrate, the real culprit often isn't that journalism isn't profitable, it's that U.S. media is predominantly run by utterly [...]

Copyright is generally understood to be for the benefit of two groups of people: creators and their audience. Given that modern copyright often acts against the interests of the general public - forbidding even the most innocuous sharing of copyright material online - copyright intermediaries such as publishers, recording companies and film studios typically place [...]

For semi-obvious reasons, I've been following developments at Bluesky closely, given that my Protocols, not Platforms paper was originally part of the reason Jack Dorsey decided to create Bluesky. I have no official association with the organization, though I did help Twitter review some of the early Bluesky proposals and spoke with a few of [...]

Law enforcement says laws are the rules that apply to everyone, but especially to people who aren't in the law enforcement business. We have to follow the laws or face the consequences. But it often appears cops hold themselves to a lower standard. They only have to follow the laws that won't get in the [...]

This morning, as you likely heard, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the NetChoice/CCIA cases regarding Texas' and Florida's social media laws. The outcomes of these cases will have a pretty major impact on the future of online speech. While a lot of people have suggested that the states' arguments are supported by conservatives, [...]

We'venoted for decadeshow, despite all the political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide," the U.S.doesn't truly know where broadband is or isn't available. The FCC's past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of [...]

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There have been plenty of silly lawsuits against tech companies over the last few years, but a new one from Nevada against Meta may be the most crazy - and most dangerous - that we've seen so far. While heavily redacted, the basics fit the pattern of all of these lawsuits. Vague claims of harms [...]

Sometimes, an advertisement is worth a thousand op-eds. Last week, one of us co-authored an op-ed criticizing an amicus brief filed by the American Economic Liberties Project and several prominent law professors in the pending Supreme Court case NetChoice v. Paxton. AELP's brief defends the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from [...]

This week, we've got a double winner on the insightful side with Toom1275 taking both top spots. In first place, it's a comment about the news that Sony has once again made purchased digital content disappear: If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing. In second place, it's a general-purpose comment about Elon Musk: There [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the EU Commission decided to mock the public by insisting all the fears about the copyright directive were myths, even as lots of real people were showing up in real life to protest, and journalists were pointing out the problems with Article 11. Amidst this, we featured a [...]

The cop-friendliest circuit in the United States has done it again. Whenever there's a bit of doubt to be had, it's the cops benefiting from it when the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court handles the case. Sure, every so often a judge or two might serve up a blistering dissent. And, even more rarely, a Fifth [...]

Who knew you could make this much fuss over a +" sign? Back in 2021, Peloton was sued by a company called World Champ Tech LLC over the former's Peloton Bike+ name. See, World Champ has a trademark for its biking mobile app called Bike+" and sued claiming that Peloton's product constituted trademark infringement. World [...]

If you work for a living, do you feel coerced into doing your job? According to Senator Mike Lee, if you have anything to do with pornography, and need to earn money in the industry, it must be coercion at play. While the world continues to be fooled by the Kids Online Safety Act's false [...]

Look, we all like to point out that when dealing in content moderation, mistakes are inevitable. But, I always find it amusing when people insist that mistakes must have been for nefarious purposes. Over the last few years, people, including ExTwitter owner Elon Musk, have insisted that stories like Twitter's decision to restrict the sharing [...]

The EU's right to be forgotten" was always a mess in theory. In practice, it's even worse. This extension of EU data privacy laws gives people the power to delist and/or remove content published by others about themselves. Anyone could immediately see how this would be abused. People wishing to remove unflattering content would send [...]

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Sometimes my I have not participated in any conspiracy to or complicity in murder" t-shirt raises a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Remember Rajat Khare? He's the guy associated with Appin Technologies in India, and there's a pattern of stories mentioning his name suddenly disappearing (or his name disappearing from them) after [...]

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

There's a post on the Creative Commons blog with someimportant news about copyright(in the UK, at least): In November 2023, the Court of Appeal inTHJ v Sheridanoffered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK. In setting the copyright originality [...]

Of all the ways in which Congress chooses to spend its time and focus its priorities, legislation introducing a solution in search of a problem is surely one of the most frustrating. With that in mind, two United States Congress critters have introduced House Resolution 7228, which aims chiefly to confer concrete copyright protection to [...]

We've been talking a lot about how as streaming subscription growth slows, streaming companies will begin doing whatever's necessary to deliver Wall Street quarterly growth at any cost. Even if it cannibalizes longer term company health, customer satisfaction, and brand quality. Just like the cable giants they disrupted, that generally means lots of prices hikes, [...]

Every time we think it can't possibly get dumber, it does. Last month, we wrote about the absolute nonsense in which New York City mayor Eric Adams declared social media a public health hazard, akin to toxic waste. As we noted at the time, this was in the midst of a variety of scandals of [...]

The DMCA process remains as easily abused as ever, even as companies like Google (and, especially, Automattic) do what they can to head off this abuse. It's a numbers game. When you're the size of Google, it's impossible to vet every takedown demand. The easiest thing to do is comply immediately and, if need be, [...]

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Something strange is happening in the legal academy, and we're worried about it. On January 23, 2024, the progressive policy organization American Economic Liberties Project filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case NetChoice v. Paxton, in support of a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from moderating - censoring" in the words of [...]

Last December, the Biden FCC proposed a basic plan to ban some of the shitty fees cable and broadband companies use to falsely advertise a lower price and jack up the cost of service. Despite the fact your cable TV and broadband bills are packed with bullshit fees, the FCC was only taking specific aim [...]

And here we go again. We've had many, many posts over recent years discussing how, in the digital age, you often don't actually own what you've bought. And before the comments section gets filled with perplexed but rather educated folks talking about how the all these cases involve products in which the terms of service [...]

Man. I have seen some shit since taking up a regular post at this fine website. I have had my mind blown with an alarming frequency. I have been sent into waves of mocking laughter more times than anyone writing for a respected website should admit. I have, in other words, been ruined by the [...]

In our coverage of the problems with KOSA and other legislative pushes to protect the children" online, we usually (for obvious reasons) come at the subject from the technology side, and look at all the ways these laws misunderstand the internet. But that's not their only flaw: these proposals also tend to lack any real [...]

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice. The cases are about a pair of laws, enacted by Texas and Florida, that attempt to force large social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and X to host large amounts of speech against their will. (Think neo-Nazi [...]

Well... this is an unexpected (and fun!) turn of events. The EU Commission has spent most of the last couple of years trying to talk EU members into voting in favor of weakened encryption, if not actual encryption backdoors. You know, for the children. On the table are things ranging from mandated client-side content scanning [...]

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By now you know that Senator Richard Blumenthal has released a new version of KOSA, the misleadingly named Kids Online Safety Act, that he pretends fixes all the problems. It doesn't. It still represents a real threat to speech online, and in particular speech from LGBTQ users. This is why Blumenthal, a prominent Democrat, is [...]

Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth. That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, and a lot of pointless mergers designed [...]

As anyone paying attention to the video game industry will already know, the last couple of weeks have seen a great deal of rumor and speculation as to the state of Xbox-istan. What started as unsubstantiated rumors suggesting that Xbox was about to make some of its Microsoft-exclusive titles crossplatform to other consoles morphed into [...]

Generative AI continues to be thehot topicin the digital world - and beyond.A previous blog postnoted that this has led to people finally asking the important question whether copyright is fit for the digital world. As far as AI is concerned, there are two sides to the question. The first is whether generative AI systems [...]

I'm normally not a ends justifies the means" sort of guy, but ever since some House Republicans started getting shitty about Section 702 surveillance after some of their own got swept up in the dragnet, I've become a bit more pragmatic. Section 702 is long overdue for reform. If it takes a bunch of conveniently [...]

Ever since he first started to make moves to purchase Twitter, Elon Musk has framed his interest in rigorously adhering to" principles of free speech. As we've noted, you have to be ridiculously gullible to believe that's true, given Elon's long history of suppressing speech, but a new book about Elon's purchase suggests that from [...]

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled anamended version last week, but it's still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like. We are asking everyone reading this tooppose this latest version, and todemand that their representatives oppose it-even [...]

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Former Rep. George Santos, kicked out of Congress last year for being an irredeemable liar, has spent his time since expulsion pulling in the big bucks making videos on Cameo for anywhere between $350 and $500 a pop. Last year, Senator John Fetterman made news when he got Santos to record a Cameo video trolling [...]

Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers. This collapse of online informational integrity is happening [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece reply to another comment about the reporter who was suspended from ExTwitter hours after publishing an article about it: In other words, he either bot boosted an article about botting, or else the botting services are giving him a freebie." You [...]