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There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn't, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are [...]

The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn't what the DOJ is claiming - it's what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United [...]

When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is - well, that's not legal strategy. That's performance art. Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the [...]

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Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated. That private contractor [...]

We've long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The news" outlet,originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVIDwas created in a North Carolina [...]

It was a couple of weeks ago when I was stupidly watching one cable news channel or another when I witnessed some GOP talking head say that Donald Trump likes to build a team of competing viewpoints that fight with one another as a way of producing the best results. I think it was Scott [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. Onward and upward!" he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space. His [...]

This is a cross post from Prof. Eric Goldman's blog, mostly written by Prof. Jess Miers, with additional commentary at the end from Eric. Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,'' [...]

This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they're finding out it won't be bent quite as easy as they thought. First, let's take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we've come to expect from the [...]

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Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order - in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge's orders - by talking about Franz Kafka's The Trial, you'd think that the judge is going to go hard against the government. Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passeda lawrequiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn't a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the [...]

It's time for yet another reminder that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an incapable leader at odds with the scientists who actually know what they're talking about. At the CDC specifically, we recently discussed the government's decision to do away with the team that was helping to identify, track, and remediate elevated levels of lead [...]

While U.S. consumer protection is generallyan historic hot mess right now, the right to repair" movement - making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own - continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair in creative and obnoxious ways. Washington State just became [...]

Here we go again with the party of the rule of law." The rule of law doesn't apply to the Trump Administration. It only applies to the victims of its vindictive policies. But the least it could do is get some basic facts straight before talking out of its ass about whatever new fascist scheme [...]

If asked, do you think corporate America would prefer to hire (1) lawyers who fight, or (2) lawyers who immediately surrender, I think you'd know the answer. And now we have some fairly unambiguous empirical data to support what the answer is. Oracle's Larry Ellison loves Trump. Morgan Stanley contributed one of their top execs [...]

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Never give up. That's the unofficial motto of the Republican party pretty much everywhere in the nation. No matter how many rights you violate, court decisions you lose, and public criticism you receive, always remember, you're in the for the long haul. It is your (allegedly) God-given right to take away other people's rights and [...]

We've noted for years how U.S. regional telecom monopolies have effectively crushed competition in many U.S. markets and utterly defanged our regulators. This one-two punch of muted competition and no oversight routinely results in expensive, slow, spotty broadband access. Frustrated by this, communities all over the U.S. have responded to this market and regulatory failure [...]

I'll start this off by acknowledging that, sure, there are times when it is perfectly reasonable to say, or even shout, We're all going to die!" Say you're on a plane that has just lost all engine power and is hurtling towards the ground, for instance. Or perhaps someone has asked you the question, Name [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica & the Chicago Tribune.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state. The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got a cross-post episode for you this week, courtesy of the Tech Policy Podcast by TechFreedom, hosted by Corbin Barthold. Both TechFreedom and The Copia Institute submitted comments on the FTC's inquiry into social media censorship, Corbin invited Mike and TechFreedom's Santana Boulton for a discussion all about what's going [...]

This is part two of my series on using AI tools to fight back against tech company control. Part one explained why we can get beyond just begging billionaires to fix our tools. This part shows exactly how I built my own tool - with zero coding skills and almost no money. A few weeks [...]

This is part one of a two-part series on using AI tools as one piece to fight back against tech company control of our lives. Part two shares the details of how I built my own task management tool in a few days for next to no money and without any coding skills. But first, [...]

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design are two very different fields that work toward the same goal: create a functional product that's a breeze for users to use and interact with. The iOS UX & UI Design Course breaks down the differences between both and helps you apply this knowledge to your app-building [...]

Here are your options as a foreigner, whether you live in the US already or are just seeking a chance to enter the country: support Israel's actions against Palestine or GTFO. The Trump Administration continues to pretend supporting Palestine is the same thing as being racist against Israel. And it's using this false dichotomy to [...]

Let's be clear: CBS/Paramount, like many corporate U.S. media outlets, initially responded to the threat of authoritarian rule by kissing Republican ass in a bid to curry favor. CBS management has long made it clear that access and ad engagement are significantly more important than the truth. But the company's looming acquisition by Skydance has [...]

With all the conversations we've had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that's not entirely [...]

A federal appeals court just delivered yet another reality check to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's transparently retaliatory investigation into Media Matters - and the timing couldn't be better, given that the FTC just opened its own bullshit investigation into the same organization for the same supposed crime": reporting factual information that made Elon Musk [...]

Reports that prominent American national security officialsuseda freely available encrypted messaging app, coupled with the rise of authoritarian policies around the world, have led to a surge in interest inencrypted appslike Signal and WhatsApp. These apps prevent anyone, including the government and the app companies themselves, from reading messages they intercept. The spotlight on encrypted [...]

Here's yet another worrying development in the world of privately-owned security cameras. Flock Safety has made aggressive in-roads in both the private and public sector, something aided greatly by the company's ability to blend the two. Much like Ring before it, Flock is pitching cheap cameras with local law enforcement buy-in, nudging residents towards leaving [...]

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Picture this: You're a researcher who has spent years developing a grant proposal, gone through layers of expert review, and received National Science Foundation (NSF) approval. Then some kid barely out of college - whose main qualification appears to be founding a company that puts ads on the blockchain - logs into a Zoom meeting, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB&J with a straightforward reaction to one of the more stunning details about oppressive laws pushing people out of Idaho: TWO-FUCKING-THIRDS of the doctors have left already?!?! In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the apparent decline in support for free speech among [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study anti-conservative bias" on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump [...]

There's a great deal that is absurd about copyright law in America, but its most basic absurdity remains the length of time for which the copyright monopoly applies. The length of copyright protection a work gets depends on a number of factors. Was the work published before or after 1978? Was it renewed, if the [...]

When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about [...]

Elon Musk may claim he's leaving the government, but regardless of whether he or anyone DOGE leaves the damage has been done, and their potential legal exposure to it remains. And with this decision earlier this week, some of the litigation pursuing it made headway. As we've written before, Judge Chutkan has had Musk and [...]

Any bit of data that isn't nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government. For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around too much" cash. This effort has been such a windfall for the DOJ that the [...]

Remember Liberation Day"? The day when Trump launched those apparently freedom-loving taxes on all Americans by declaring war on global commerce so hard that we were even planning on taxing penguins on uninhabited islands? Well, some of you might recall that the Constitution distributes power, and doesn't give it all to the President. And Trump's [...]

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Hey, if we have to be fair (and we don't), we can trace some of this intranational movement to policies that predate the current shitshow we're somehow expected to believe is the host to the Leader of the Free World. A patchwork of marijuana legalization laws has led directly to law enforcement camping out on [...]

So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn't actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after [...]

We recently talked about Donald Trump's foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take for someone who seems to care so deeply about genetics in other areas, but Donald Trump [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

What the fuck is going on at the Pentagon? We've talked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's apparent penchant for exposing attack plans over unsecure, easily hacked messaging apps. But there was also a bit of a scandal in April, when three of his top aides were fired as part of a leak" investigation. And now, [...]

That summation greatly oversimplifies things, but if all you're going to read is a headline, it will have to do. We'll dig in deeper into the Fifth Circuit's second attempt to handle content moderation vis-a-vis public libraries, but first, we'll take a look back to what happened last year. In middle of book ban bills [...]