Techdirt

Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, […]

One of the (many) villains in “Walled Culture” the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to ebooks. What could have been one of the most important expansions of the power and possibility of the book form became instead its opposite – a diminishment […]

The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers. Former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is still […]

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On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic. In response, Twitter spent a few years hiring some fantastic engineers and building up a […]

Back in January, we noted that T-Mobile had recently revealed it had been hacked eight times over the last five years. But a new report by security expert Brian Krebs suggests it could be far worse than that. According to Krebs, hackers are making a compelling case that they’ve managed to compromise the wireless giant’s […]

What amazing timing! Merely a few weeks back we were discussing the major regulatory hurdles the United States, the EU, and the UK were putting in front of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68 billion. Agencies from all three governing bodies, while differing on some specifics, generally had the same concerns: lessening the […]

Between Sydney “tried to break up my marriage” and “blew my mind because of her personality,” we have had a lot of journalists anthropomorphizing AI chatbots lately. TIME’s cover story decided to go even further and argued: “If future AIs gain the ability to rapidly improve themselves without human guidance or intervention, they could potentially wipe […]

After all these years, the Supreme Court is finally weighing in on Section 230 in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases, and the outcome could have a very significant impact. Our organization, the Copia Institute, filed an amicus brief in the case, as did many other parties. This week, we’re joined by Jess Miers from the […]

It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years. And, […]

For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges. This is more of […]

The Ultimate Learn to Code Bundle has 80+ hours of immersive, multifaceted, programming education. When it comes to web programming, there are a lot of tools you can learn and use to make your workflow more efficient and your products more exciting. This bundle will give you a crash course into a variety of languages and tools, […]

Last week I wrote some initial thoughts on the Supreme Court hearing in Gonzalez v. Google. Of course, as lots of people mentioned, it was tied at the hip with another case, Taamneh v. Twitter, as both were granted cert together. The two cases have been connected for a while, as the decisions in the […]

The Biden administration has given all federal agencies 30 days to ensure staffers do not have TikTok on any federal devices. All agency vendors are to adhere to the same rules within 90 days. It’s the latest evolution in a growing planetary moral panic that’s gotten well out ahead of its skis, resulting in often-performative solutions that […]

Legislating from the bench is always problematic. People who like what courts have decided will claim this was the right thing to do. People who don’t like the decision will claim this is an overstep. Whatever the case in Virginia, this is good news. Legislation from the bench happened. But it didn’t turn into actual […]

You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, […]

In January, we asked designers to create games based on works that entered the public domain this year for our fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! It took us a little while to get through all the entries, but now it’s time to announce the winners, and it was not an […]

What if we told you the Stupid Patent of the Month has a sponsor, but we don’t know who it is? That would seem shady, wouldn’t it? This month’s stupid patent, U.S. Patent No. 9,986,435, was brought to you—to all of us, really—from the murky depths of the litigation finance industry. Originally assigned to a shell […]

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Big data has always been big business but, in recent years, it’s also become big government business. The stuff advertisers like is also stuff the government likes. Millions of tax dollars have been fed to private companies offering government agencies a wealth of information they’ve never had access to before. Everyone carries a computer in […]

Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to proclaim himself a defender of free speech, but time and time again he’s looked to stifle, suppress, and silence speech. He’s done it with his social media bill that limits the 1st Amendment rights of social media sites, with his Stop WOKE Act which literally bars speech, and with […]

So we’ve noted more than a few times that Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab. The company had already raised prices, it had already monetized the thing it was worried about (it already charges you extra if you want more simultaneous streams), and its hard 180 from encouraging password sharing to demonizing […]

And if that title didn’t really confuse you all that much, then you’ve managed to get the point. Eminem hasn’t been shy about asserting his intellectual property rights in the past, though much of his efforts on that front have actually been to the benefit of artists from his fights with record labels. That doesn’t […]

I’m not sure what’s happening inside Israel’s intelligence services, but it’s not sending the world its best when it’s done with them. For months, we’ve been covering tons of negative news generated by tech companies started up by former Israeli government employees. Most of this has been focused on NSO Group, a malware merchant with […]

After years of criticism about their inaccuracy, the FCC recently spent another $50 million (on top of the $350 million they’d already spent) on supposedly better broadband maps. But the end result is still a bit of a mess, with entrenched telecom monopolies like Comcast being repeatedly caught claiming to deliver broadband in areas that […]

One of the key things that Elon Musk promised in taking over Twitter was about how he was going to be way more transparent. He’s mentioned it many times, specifically noting that transparency is how he would build “trust” in the company. So, anyway, about that… over a decade ago, the big internet companies set […]

While we’re waiting to see if the Trump-stocked Supreme Court is going to end the internet as we know it, the nation’s top court has been rejecting, without comment, other essential cases that really could have used another set of judicial eyes. On Wednesday, we covered one of the Supreme Court’s passes — this one […]

Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. Scrivener makes it easy to structure ideas, write a first draft, […]

It’s become frustrating how often people insist that losing this or that social media account is “censorship” and an “attack on free speech.” Not only is it not that, it makes a mockery of those who face real censorship and real attacks on free speech. The Washington Post recently put out an amazing feature about […]

If anyone can call a government’s bluff, it’s Signal. It’s a nonprofit, which means it doesn’t need to make a bunch of shareholders happy by capitulating to ridiculous government demands in order to retain market share. Governments really can’t threaten Signal. It doesn’t collect or retain user information, so it can’t hand this data over […]

This week, our both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about attempts to censor and control the internet “for the children”. In first place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with the first comment on the post: Wow, it’s almost as if a bunch of moralizing busybodies want to control what […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the FCC’s broadband availability data was being derided as inaccurate and “shameful”, while the agency was relaunching its map that hallucinates broadband competition. We got a clear idea of when net neutrality protections would formally end, while more than half of US states were pushing their own net […]

At this point it should be common knowledge that if it has to do with any kind of speech, there is nothing that China won’t try to control and/or censor. It’s something of an amazing self-contradiction: in order to be large and powerful, the Beijing government believes it has to behave as though it is […]

ShotSpotter claims its gunshot detection tech is something cities battling gun violence just can’t (almost literally) live without. Data generated by cities paying millions for the tech often says otherwise. On multiple occasions over the past few years, cities have terminated their contracts with ShotSpotter, citing the tech’s overall uselessness. Cops in Newark, New Jersey […]

We wrote a few times about the problems of Spotify’s attempt to colonize the podcast market. While it was, perhaps, an understandable move driven by the economics of our totally broken copyright systems which made it impossible to be truly profitable with just music, Spotify’s decision to go after the podcast market, shelling out massive […]

There’s no reason anyone should look to Louisiana for legislative leadership. The state still has an oft-abused criminal defamation law on the books in 2023 — the sort of law that would have looked out of place a century ago. I guess you can be on the cutting edge when your legislative moves appeal to […]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, […]

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the massive moral panic going on right now, claiming that the internet is somehow inherently dangerous for kids. As we’ve noted, the evidence simply does not support this. Over and over and over again we see the actual data and actual research shows no evidence of any inherent […]

We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless. For example, corporations will routinely inform you that it’s no big deal that they’re over-collecting and selling access to your browsing or location data to any idiot with a nickel […]

The Streisand Effect. Some folks know it. Some folks even think that some people that know it use it purposefully to their own advantage. Other times people who should know better simply flail around and end up turning content viral which they had intended on burying. So, whenever we do these kinds of posts, someone […]

U.S. consumer protection in general has had an ugly few decades. One bright spot however has been the shift in the “right to repair” movement from niche nerdy fare to the mainstream. Not only have corporate efforts to monopolize repair resulted in a flood of proposed state and federal laws, the Biden Administration’s executive order on monopoly power […]

Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), passed in 2008, continues to be the Little Legislation That Could. While occasionally hijacked by opportunistic litigants whose privacy hasn’t actually been violated, it’s also been used to achieve some objective good. In 2020, the law played an instrumental part in wresting a $550 million settlement from Facebook over […]

It’s getting to be somewhat exhausting watching people who don’t understand Section 230 insisting they have a simple solution for whatever problems they think (mostly incorrectly) are created by Section 230. And, of course, the NY Times seems willing to publish all of them. This is the same NY Times that had to run a […]

The UK government has made no secret of its desire to convert providing encryption into a criminal act. The fact that some things are beyond the government’s reach is unacceptable. While lawmakers may suggest this will only target “criminal” purveyors and users, there’s no reason to believe this won’t be expanded every time law enforcement […]

The GameCreators Mega Maker Pack Bundle will help you develop your own dream video game, and publish it on multiple platforms with thousands of royalty-free, 2D and 3D assets. You get AppGameKit Studio, a fully featured game development toolset with two asset packs. The bundle also has GameGuru, a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an […]

Last summer, we wrote about New York’s law to require websites to have “hateful conduct” policies, noting that it was “ridiculous” and “likely unconstitutional.” The law was passed in the wake of the horrific Buffalo super market shooting, where the state’s Governor and Attorney General sought to blame the internet, rather than the government’s own […]

Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal, who predicted job losses, the charming potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and […]

We’ve been talking a lot about video game preservation and strategies for maintaining as much of this cultural output as possible in an industry where the norm is to sunset games after a certain period of time. Most recently, we discussed the comments made by legendary game designer John Carmack, prescribing how game publishers and […]

To be clear, Elon Musk’s Starlink broadband service is great if you have no other options and can afford it. Especially if you’ve spent an eternity stuck on an expensive 3 Mbps DSL line straight out of 2003, or a traditional, capped, expensive satellite broadband connection. The ability to get somewhere between 10 and 100 […]

Donald Trump and his supporters are unable to process facts. That inability led to many of them engaging in questionable election-related lawsuits and extremely questionable election-related public statements. Alleging a “stolen” election, Trump and his backers claimed, without any supporting evidence, voting machines/software made by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic conspired to rob the lame […]