Techdirt

Last year, Techdirt was one of only a very few sites where you could find out information on California’s AB 2273, officially the “California Age Appropriate Design Code” or “Kid’s code.” As with so many bills that talk about “protecting the children,” everyone we talked to said they were afraid to speak up, because they […]

While we’re all waiting to see if the Supreme Court is willing to destroy Section 230 immunity the way it did abortion rights, more bad news has been delivered by the top court in the land. Hidden among the list [PDF] of dozens of cases the Supreme Court will not be reviewing is this one, […]

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Despite the Supreme Court hearing what could be the most consequential case regarding the future of the internet in decades, I decided to log off for most of Tuesday and go do something fun, far away from any internet connection. I didn’t listen live to the oral arguments, but rather chose to listen (at 3x […]

Colorado is the latest state to move forward on new “right to repair” legislation despite a growing and sustained lobbying effort by industry. The Colorado House of Representatives passed the bipartisan Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act (HB23-1011) with a 44-17 vote on Tuesday, the first major right to repair legislation to be passed […]

For years, law enforcement agencies converted themselves into quasi-military agencies with the assistance of the Defense Department. Whatever the military no longer needed, cops could have for cheap or free, as long as they remembered to say things about “national security” when filling out their 1033 program requisitions. Unsurprisingly, the acquisition of warrior gear (camouflage […]

Karl just wrote about CNET, a once-vaunted resource for tech journalism, absolutely stepping on every rake it could find by using AI-generated content that was absolutely laughable: the content tended to be inaccurate, plagiarized, or otherwise so full of mistakes that an army of editors had to rework the content, largely wiping away any cost […]

If you’ve been reading Techdirt recently, you probably know all about supposed “AI Lawyer” service DoNotPay and the tireless investigation of the company undertaken by Kathryn Tewson, who has written a couple of Techdirt posts about the saga. This week, Kathryn joins us on the podcast for a long and entertaining discussion about the entire […]

And here I was thinking that the last few months of Twitter shenanigans with Elon Musk at the helm had done something nearly impossible: made Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership of Meta (Facebook/Instagram) look thoughtful and balanced in comparison. But then, on Sunday, Zuckberg announced that Meta is following Musk down the dubious road of making “verification” […]

To fend off a ban in the U.S., TikTok lobbyists have attempted to put on a doomed charm offensive in DC, spending a record $5.4 million on U.S. lawmaker influence last year. The effort has even involved opening “transparency centers” in DC designed to “educate” lawmakers on content moderation and the steps TikTok is apparently […]

Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about the Complete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you’ll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting […]

A lot of people freaked out on Friday after the news came out that Twitter was going to make SMS two-factor authentication (2FA) only available to paid Twitter Blue subscribers. The news was first broken, like so much Twitter news these days, by Platformer reporter Zoe Schiffer. It’s understandable that people were up in arms […]

Court transparency and equitable access to court documents are ongoing struggles. The federal court system’s malicious compliance with congressional directives has given us exorbitant fees and a clunky, counterintuitive platform for online access to court documents. Part of the federal court system doesn’t even give us that much. Despite being subject to a 2016 law […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes from Violet Aubergine in response to the accusation that coverage of Elon Musk is motivated by hatred: We don’t hate Musk. We would love it if Musk was diligently working at making Twitter better via methods that don’t mimic a coked up grizzly bear. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we took a look at how we got to the point where Hollywood is trying to attack the internet via NAFTA. In a case with echoes of those about to go before the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit shut down a “terrorists used Twitter” lawsuit. Congress was pressuring […]

Thanks to drug legalization, there’s a new “drug corridor” that Kansas law enforcement is taking advantage of. Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2012. Ever since then, state troopers have camped out on I-70 to stop people heading to or from the weed-friendly state. It’s weird to call a road leading to a state with […]

We’ve had no shortage of posts at Techdirt on the problems of fraud and abuse in the current DMCA takedown process. The reason for that is pretty obvious: the whole thing is so wide open to this kind of abuse that it’s actually sort of a wonder that it doesn’t suffer from it even more […]

Lots of people have really strange ideas about what defamation entails. Far too many people believe defamation occurs anytime their feelings are hurt or they aren’t portrayed in the best light possible. These people are wrong. Often, those in wrong choose to represent themselves when they desire to be out-tilted by windmills. Sometimes, they retain […]

Next week, the Supreme Court will hold the oral arguments in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases. Gonzalez is the main show (and I’m somewhat surprised they didn’t have the hearings on the same day). There were dozens upon dozens of amicus briefs filed in the case, including one by us. There have been lots of […]

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The city of Green Bay, Wisconsin feels no private conversation in city hall should go unheard. The city feels there’s nothing wrong with installing overhead mics to snoop on citizens who might be congregating in the hall’s halls. “I think it’s pretty customary to have the kind of surveillance systems that we have here,” Green […]

The good news: last December New York State finally passed a landmark “right to repair” bill providing American consumers some additional protection from repair monopolies. The bad news: before the bill was passed, corporate lobbyists worked with New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to covertly water the bill down almost to the point of meaninglessness. […]

We’ve dealt with a great many silly trademark disputes in the video game industry over the years, but this one is a special kind of stupid. Fntastic, the studio behind the forthcoming The Day Before horror game, has released a couple statements lately regarding an apparent ongoing trademark dispute. The first announcement confirmed that the […]

In 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling “unlimited” wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits. The lawsuit noted that, starting in 2011, AT&T began selling “unlimited” plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out […]

U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), like nearly every government agency, doesn’t care much for FOIA requests or requesters. It generally takes a lawsuit to force the agency to comply with its FOIA obligations. And its day-to-day handling of FOIA requests is so uninspired, it couldn’t even come up with a reason to deny Mike […]

We just recently wrote about the reasons why Congress should move, right now, to codify the NYT v. Sullivan case into law. While considered mostly settled and uncontroversial, in the last few years there have been increasing attacks on this ruling, which has been one of the most important rulings in preserving and protecting free […]

X-Mirage turns your Mac into an AirPlay receiver for mirroring whatever on your iPhone, iPad or iPod screen – apps, games, photos, videos, presentations, websites, and more to the bigger screen. With real-time mirroring and media control, X-Mirage gives you the best gaming, content viewing, and browsing experience. Taking airplay to the next level, this […]

Bad people selling terrible things to even worse people has been around since long before the debut of smartphones. But now it’s just so much easier to bring these two parties together to inflict misery on others. What’s considered to be just a good investigative tool when wielded by government agencies (looking at you, NSO […]

As more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies begin to flow, entrenched U.S. broadband providers are working overtime to try and secure their share of it by any means necessary. That has included sabotaging grant applications from competitors, changing state laws to dictate who can or can’t get these subsidies, and falsely inflating their actual […]

Perhaps it’s a result of spending many years now writing about intellectual property matters, but it is still shocking just how little understanding there is for how fair use works in conjunction with copyright law. It’s especially irritating when the folks who don’t understand it come from the government itself. Which brings us to the […]

A few months ago at a conference, I was somewhat surprised to hear from an academic whose views on antitrust are closely aligned with FTC chair Lina Khan complain to me that Khan appeared to be a disaster as an FTC Commissioner, noting that multiple FTC staffers had been complaining or heading for the exits. […]

“Innocent until proven guilty” is the standard we claim to respect here in the United States. In reality, it’s anything but. Arrested people have their faces splashed across news sites and mug shot aggregators, presented as nothing more than a face and a list of charges. Accused criminals are almost always discussed without the “accused” […]

I wrote last week about the bizarrely bad House Oversight hearing that was supposed to expose how Twitter, the deep state, and the, um “Biden Crime Family” conspired to suppress the NY Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, wishful thinking does not make facts, and we already know that story is totally false. […]

The FBI has had access to Section 702 surveillance and it has always abused this access. The data and communications are collected by the NSA under this authority. Once collected, the FBI hooks up to this massive data store and to perform backdoor searches on domestic targets, even though it’s only supposed to received masked/minimized […]

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What’s the opposite of shadowbanning? Maxboosting? I dunno, but whatever it is, that’s what Twitter’s frustrated and exhausted engineers gave Elon Musk after he whined (for not the first time) that people might like someone more than they like Elon. By now you know the basics: last week it was reported that Elon was getting […]

As we’ve noted a few times now, U.S. taxpayers have doled out more than $400 million to map broadband access, yet regulators are still struggling to get it right. U.S. ISPs routinely overstate broadband availability and coverage, and they’ve historically challenged efforts to improve broadband maps lest it truly illustrate the downsides of monopoly power […]

To say that AI-generated art is controversial would be something of an understatement. The appearance last year of free tools like Stable Diffusion has not just thrown the world of art into turmoil, it has raised profound questions about the nature of human creativity. AI art also involves thorny issues of copyright that have piqued the interest […]

Telecom and media giants have been working overtime to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who hates Hispanics, rural Americans, cops, puppies, and freedom. With Sohn freshly […]

We’ve got a double-header of cross-post episodes for you this week! Recently, Mike joined two different podcasts to discuss Congress’s response to the Twitter Files and the dumpster fire of a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee: The New Abnormal podcast from the Daily Beast, and The Sunday Show podcast from Tech Policy Press. […]

Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the world’s most tenacious paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, has been carefully dismantling claim after claim after claim from the company DoNotPay and its CEO Joshua Browder. I won’t rehash all of her discoveries, but many of them called into question Browder’s apparent tendency to massively overstate […]

After years of portraying tech companies as havens for nerd antagonists, FBI Director Chris Wray is trying to build a few extremely belated bridges. The rift between FBI and tech companies started with the rollout of default encryption for phones. Apple was the first to market with by-default encryption, something that became the focus of […]

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Last week we highlighted an amazing story of how Elon apparently threw a tantrum at Twitter HQ because the amount of “engagement” on his tweets was declining. Also in that article were details about how Musk sends engineers totally random bullshit requests all the time and they feel they have to deal with it, dropping […]

We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number of mental health apps that routinely collect and monetize sensitive consumer mental health data, yet fail to meaningfully protect the data they collect. […]

New York’s Finest continue to set the sort of records New York residents would rather the NYPD didn’t. The NYPD is not too big to fail. But it’s apparently too big to curtail. In 2019, it capped off a spectacular two-year run in which it racked up over a half-billion in lawsuit settlements. That’s on […]

The Church of Latter Day Saints has made it onto our pages before for trying to abuse intellectual property laws, typically to keep content out of the public eye that it finds undesirable. I do like to note in posts like this that the LDS Church has also occasionally been quite lenient when it comes […]

The Supreme Court — years after the ubiquity of cell phones and their cameras — has yet to provide nationwide guidance on a topic that should be considered settled: the right to record public officials while they engage in their public duties. If cops can assert anything happening on a public street has no reasonable […]

We were just talking about how Twitter’s ad revenue woes may be even worse than previously expected. Earlier reports had suggested that ad revenue was down 40% as many of the biggest advertisers had abandoned ship in the name of protecting their own brand safety. But the more recent report said that advertising was actually […]

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