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Donald Trump promised to take the social media world by storm with his Truth Social Twitter-clone for the MAGA world. “Free speech!” he claimed as he banned anyone who criticized him. Of course, from the beginning, many suspected that this was all a very sketchy grift, using a SPAC to try to cash in on […]

Late last year we discussed a plainly stupid trademark lawsuit brought by Dairy Queen, which makes tasty frozen snacks, and W.B. Mason which is a strange combination of furniture and grocery store. At issue was the latter’s attempt to trademark some bottled water it sells under the brand “Blizzard Water”. Notably, W.B. Mason had sold […]

Ever since it came into effect, we’ve been calling out how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was an obviously problematic bit of legislation. In the four years since it’s gone into effect, we’ve seen nothing to change that opinion. For users, it’s been a total nuisance. Rather than take the big US internet […]

The Internet of things — aka the tendency to bring Internet connectivity to devices whether they need them or not — has provided no shortage of both tragedy and comedy. “Smart” locks that are easy to bypass, “smart” fridges that leak your email credentials, or even “smart” barbies that spy on toddlers are all pretty […]

As we see more and more western countries looking to regulate the internet in order to stifle speech they dislike, we’ve noted how much these efforts seem to be almost directly modeled on how China censors the internet. You might think that would be a reason to run in the other direction, but too many […]

I had to rewrite this post before it got published. I originally began it with some whimsy in response to the absurdity that copyright cases like these always engender. The idea that people could ever use their rights in previous expression to forbid someone else’s subsequent expression is almost too absurd to take seriously as […]

Law enforcement agencies have access to very powerful digital tools. Thanks to companies with eyes on market expansion but very little consideration of moral or ethical issues, cops have the power to completely compromise phones, turning them into unwitting informants… or worse. This blockbuster report — written by Andy Greenberg for Wired and based on […]

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve written quite a bit about the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which has become the central push by a bunch of folks in Congress to create a special antitrust bill for “big tech.” There are some good ideas in the bill, but, as we’ve been highlighting, a […]

In response to the Supreme Court’s recent assault on female bodily autonomy, numerous U.S. corporations have issued statements stating they’ll be paying for employee abortion travel. You’re to ignore, apparently, that many of these same companies continue to throw millions of dollars at the politicians responsible for turning the Supreme Court into a dangerous, cruel, […]

An interesting development in the digital world has been the continuing rise of gaming as a hugely popular activity, and a hugely profitable industry. Flowing from that rise and popularity, there is yet another fascinating aspect: streaming games for entertainment. The best-known example of this phenomenon is Twitch, now owned by Amazon. A new paper by […]

Ten states are currently home to a version of California’s “Marsy’s Law.” This law is a “victim’s rights” law, named after a California murder victim. It was written with the intent of involving crime victims in the criminal justice process, giving them a “right” to be heard during court proceedings, choose their own representation (rather […]

For at least three years now, we have been discussing the goings on concerning a trademark application submitted by Ohio State University for using the word “the” on apparel. If your brain just came to a screeching halt, it may be because you’re not a college sports fan. See, Ohio State University absolutely loves referring […]

Last month, we noted that there was a new “protect the children” bill that was proposed in the EU that would effectively outlaw encryption, while simultaneously require full internet scanning of basically all activity. As we noted in our post, it was still early in the process, and now the German government has stepped up […]

The “Miranda rights” established by the Supreme Court in 1966 are a little less guaranteed going forward. The Supreme Court has issued an opinion [PDF] that limits what citizens whose rights have been violated can do — limiting them to exercising these rights during criminal trials as a component of their Fifth Amendment rights. The […]

The Basics of Python Programming course will help you explore both basic and intermediate concepts of the Python programming language – the world’s most popular programming language. Learn how to write Python programs from scratch with a hands-on approach where you will be able to develop your skills and knowledge as a Python developer. The […]

If you accidentally leave your Google Drive accessible to anyone with the URL, and someone goes there and deletes stuff, is that “unauthorized access” and a violation of the CFAA? To me, the answer should be absolutely not. But in this recent ruling the judge went the other direction (first noted by Evan Brown). So, […]

Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety. The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to some bargain-basement transphobic bigotry: I could point you at a trans discussing what its like to be a trans, but you are so aggressive towards trans people that i will not set an rabid dog on their case. Suffice to […]

Five Years Ago Although there’s no joy in thinking about the Supreme Court right now, it offered a mixed bag of decisions this week in 2017 that should be highlighted: it reminded the government that hate speech is 1A protected, it declined to hear the Dancing Baby copyright case despite the government’s admission of “serious […]

We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this […]

Prime Minister Nahendra Mohdi’s government has apparently peered over the Great Wall of China (to pedants: figuratively, of course) and liked what it was seeing. China is the world leader in pervasive surveillance — something the government uses to shield the government from criticism and to keep the people the government considers to be undesirable […]

Clearview has never had a great reputation. Its first appearance in the public eye — via a Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times — was inauspicious, to say the least. The company’s database was composed of data and photos scraped from thousands of websites. This image database — which has now passed 10 […]

Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the […]

Give anyone access to tons of sensitive personal information and it’s bound to result in abuse. Give cops access to this data and abuse is guaranteed. Why? Because law enforcement officers — for reasons unfathomable to regular people — face far fewer consequences for violating internal policies and breaking laws. Regular people get fired. Cops […]

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We’ve covered on here former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform for violating its terms of service (a lawsuit that is not going well at all), but I had missed that some random person, Maria Rutenberg, had also sued Twitter for the same thing. No, not for kicking […]

For more than a decade, cable and broadcast executives brushed aside the threat of cable TV “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV) as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon. There were endless reports about how these users were poor and unimportant (they weren’t), or how the phenomenon would end once Millennials bought homes and […]

The saga of Ed Sheeran and the copyright case over his Shape of You song may finally be coming to a close. The case, brought by Sami Chokri, was very thin, largely centering on a two-word refrain line repeated 3 times both Sheeran’s song and Chokri’s Oh Why. Sheeran prevailed, with the court stating that […]

We’ve been highlighting the one big problem with Amy Klobuchar’s AICOA antitrust bill being that it has a trojan horse to enable lawsuit challenges over content moderation — and that this is the main reason why Republicans are supporting it. Still, with a big push to get the bills over the finish line, Adam Conner […]

Well, this is an unwelcome development. The US defence contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group’s surveillance technology, in a possible deal that would give an American company control over one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools. Multiple sources confirmed that discussions were centred on a sale of the […]

Last week we wrote about a truly silly bill, introduced by a bunch of Republican Senators, that would basically ban email providers from letting political mailings go to spam. It’s quite a move to make it a key part of your political platform that politicians need to get special rights to spam people, but, alas, […]

This post analyzes California AB 587, self-described as “Content Moderation Requirements for Internet Terms of Service.” I believe the bill will get a legislative hearing later this month. A note about the draft I’m analyzing, posted here. It’s dated June 6, and it’s different from the version publicly posted on the legislature’s website (dated April 28). I’m not […]

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For a while now, as Democrats have insisted that the two main antitrust bills that have been able to scrape together bipartisan support won’t have any impact on content moderation, we keep pointing out that the only reason they have Republican support is because Republicans want it to impact content moderation. After all, Ted Cruz […]

U.S. consumers face a parade of major privacy and security problems. Poorly secured routers, Internet things devices with zero privacy and security safeguards, major telecom network vulnerabilities, a massive unaccountable adtech and telecom hyper-surveillance apparatus (often unaccountably linked to government), all operating in a country that can’t seem to pass a privacy law for the […]

Video games have always had bugs at the time of their release, though there has been a trend coinciding with the uptick in digital game sales in which games seem to be published in broken states far too often and are then “fixed” with a day-one patch or something of the like. Some of these […]

In what definitely feels like a case of way too little, way too late, the WTO last week finally decided to grant the TRIPS waiver on COVID vaccines, allowing others to make more of the vaccine without violating patent rights. The WTO has long had this ability to issue a patent waiver as part of […]

We’ve got some great new discussions for the Techdirt Podcast… coming in a few weeks. But at the moment, amidst a very busy schedule on a variety of fronts, we’re taking a short break to look back on a very old conversation: our 14th episode ever, from 2015, about media companies rolling out proprietary content […]

As the big push is on to approve two internet-focused antitrust bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act, we’ve been calling out that while the overall intentions of both may be good, there are real concerns with the language of both and how it could impact content […]

The Uvalde Police Department — recipient of 40% of the city’s budget — botched its response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Rather than rush to the sound of gunfire, the officers stopped making forward progress once they were adjacent to the gunfire. It took another law enforcement agency (a Border Patrol tactical […]

Buldix is a powerful drag and drop website builder with no coding, that helps both non-techies to build their own websites and web developers to create online projects (websites/landing pages) for their clients in no time. Buldix comes with dozens of responsive pre-built templates, blocks, and elements that make building websites easy and fast for […]

Apparently missing the entire controversy the White House faced just a few weeks ago regarding Homeland Security’s poorly explained Disinformation Governance Board (which has since been put on hold), the White House is trying yet again, with its new White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse. At least this time, they didn’t […]

It’s always interesting to watch one-time disruptors shift toward turf protection, apparently remembering none of the annoyances that drove their passion for disruption (and ultimate success) in the first place. Once Netflix was as powerful as the telecom sector, it shifted its tone on issues like net neutrality. And as the now-dominant company has increasingly […]

Cops love secrecy. When a citizen does something wrong, it’s a public record. When cops do the wrong thing, union contracts, internal policies, and multiple public records exemptions often allow law enforcement agencies to keep the public from learning about misconduct. Things have been changing, though. California recently amended its public records law, making police […]

You may recall that, last fall, we wrote about a truly bizarre legal fight, in which a little-followed pseudonymous Twitter account @CallMeMoneyBags had tweeted out some images of a woman, suggesting a few times that the woman was the mistress of billionaire Brian Sheth. The account put out lots of tweets generally mocking people in […]

We’ve been pointing out for a long time now that the main antitrust bill making its way through the Senate has a hidden content moderation trojan horse in it. Indeed, it seems likely the main reason the bill has significant Republican support is that they know the bill will be abused to file vexatious lawsuits […]

CoreCivic is one of the nation’s largest private prison companies. And while it should already be concerning that we even have private prison companies, CoreCivic appears to be particularly awful. Just last week, CoreCivic was in the 9th Circuit appeals court trying to overturn a dismissal of its SLAPP lawsuit that it filed against investment […]

It appears all but inevitable that Julian Assange will be receiving an all-expenses-paid (except for his defense!) one-way trip to the United States to face espionage charges for, mostly, performing acts of journalism. The Wikileaks founder has done plenty of self-inflicted damage to his reputation over the past few years, but his organization was instrumental […]

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