Techdirt

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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To hear consecutive FBI directors tell it, unless legislators are willing to mandate encryption backdoors, the criminals (including terrorists!) will win. That’s the only option — at least according to Jim Comey and Chris Wray — given that the FBI, with its billions in funding and wealth of brainpower, is apparently unable to decrypt files […]

Not this again… a few years ago we wrote a post about Senator Joe Manchin’s very, very, very bad “See Something Say Something” Act. The bill would remove Section 230 for companies that don’t file a shit ton of nonsense busywork filings for anything they see online that might be bad having to do with […]

We’ve mentioned more than a few times how the great moral panic over TikTok is a hollow performance by unserious people who have little actual interest in consumer privacy. Folks like the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who’ve spent years opposing funding privacy regulators or passing a meaningful Internet privacy law, yet now suffer repeated, performative embolisms […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are comments about the expert consensus that Elon Musk has made Twitter’s CSAM problem worse. In first place it’s Thad responding to a Musk apologist offering up a nonsensical defense: Did you read the article? Did you read the headline? In second place, it’s Rocky responding […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the FCC was patting itself on the back for a historically stupid year, while it issued a report falsely claiming that killing net neutrality helped broadband competition, just as New Jersey became the latest state to protect net neutrality by executive order. Meanwhile, Hollywood was pushing some wild […]

Over a year ago, as the world was still largely reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, we wrote about the trend beginning to form for consolidation in the video game industry. Industry consolidation is very typical in times of economic strife and it appears the video game industry is not immune to it. We heard about […]

To be sure, SWAT operations are pulled off flawlessly around the nation every day. The right addresses are hit. The right windows are smashed. The right doors are destroyed. The correct perps are arrested. The proper people are filled with bullets if needed, etc. But, far too often, they go wrong. Often more concerned with […]

Techdirt has been writing about evergreening — making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s control over it — for ten years now. The evergreening approach betrays the implicit bargain that lies at the heart of patents — that a […]

To be clear: despite a lot of media coverage claiming otherwise, the GOP (and much of the DNC) was never actually serious about antitrust reform. The GOP in particular has a forty year track record of supporting unchecked monopolization and consolidation with no meaningful government oversight across virtually every industry (telecom, banking, energy, and transportation […]

The across-the-pond Chris Wray analogues are still at work trying to undermine encryption for the sole purpose of greasing exceedingly squeaky law enforcement wheels. Friction is unacceptable, UK officials appear to believe, as they move forward with efforts meant to undermine this essential protection. It’s not that the UK government is wholly opposed to encryption. […]

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There’s a school of thought among some who believe that the sole reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter was because of a gaping void in his soul and a deep-seeded need to be loved and adored by everyone, with the belief that he could do that better if he ran Twitter, and without the fear […]

As the EU contemplates its digital policy trajectory for the next decade, the idea that “big tech” should pay “big telecom” for no coherent reason has also managed to unsurprisingly surface. The rhetoric, that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the Internet and should therefore give telecom giants billions of dollars, directly mirrors the policy con telecom […]

It’s nearly time for the Super Bowl, the NFL’s orgy of advertising with a bit of football mixed in to keep things interesting. And, as per usual, the NFL has been running around pretending that it has intellectual property rights that it doesn’t have. This year, while not an entirely unique thing, the NFL has […]

A few days ago we wrote about some bills in the Utah legislature that were promoted as “protecting kids” by demanding age verification for all internet services, and then barring some kids from using them, while also giving parents access to kids’ accounts. These bills are almost certainly going to pass. They seem to have […]

In April 2019, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was booted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrested by UK authorities on behalf of the US to face criminal charges related to CIA leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. He was not the only activist with an Ecuadorian nexus to be arrested that day. Ola Bini, a […]

So, we already noted that Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee’s grandstanding hearing about Twitter revealed how Trump’s White House asked Twitter to remove a tweet from Chrissy Teigen that mocked the then president by calling him a “pussy ass bitch.” Apparently Trump’s fragile ego couldn’t handle that level of insult, and so he had to ask […]

The leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision helped everyone. It helped people who supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade consolidate their power so they could effectively punish people for trying to escape unwanted pregnancies. It helped supporters of abortion rights prepare for the coming wave of anti-abortion legislation, much of it containing Dobbs-dependent […]

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I have a confession. While yesterday the House Oversight Committee took up six hours (sorta, as there was a big power outage in the middle) wasting everyone’s time with a hearing on “Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” I chose not to watch it in real-time. Instead, afterwards I went back and watched […]

Back in 2015, you might recall how the Russian Government was caught hacking into the DNC. It wasn’t particularly subtle; a Russian intelligence officer pretending to be a Romanian hacker made the dumb mistake of forgetting to turn on his VPN, revealing his Russian intelligence agency IP address to the world. The data he obtained […]

The conversation about preservation in the video game industry is continuing at a nice pace. Honestly, the most encouraging part of all of this, as someone who has been writing about this topic for several years now, is seeing how much more mainstream the topic has become. It used to be that certain servers or […]

It hasn’t been a great few weeks for CNET. If you hadn’t seen, the company was busted using AI to generate dozens of stories without informing readers or the public. Despite newfound hype, the AI wasn’t particularly good at its job, creating content that had persistent issues with both accuracy and plagiarism. Of the 77 […]

There’s been this weird series of articles lately, trying to frame the rapid growth of the fediverse (mainly Mastodon), as somehow now failing. It started last month, with the Guardian’s Josh Nicholas leaping in with a provocative headline: “Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around” and […]

Mr. “I’m going to open up the libel laws” never got around to opening them up. It was another pet project for Trump, one constantly just another couple weeks away from achieving. “Strong looks” were presumably taken by Trump’s legal experts, but even their collective incompetence couldn’t overcome the First Amendment. Neither can Donald Trump, […]

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Soon after he announced his plans to buy Twitter, Elon Musk’s investor pitch leaked, and it was every bit as ridiculous as people have come to expect from Musk. One thing it included was a plan to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising, which (in a vacuum) is not a terrible idea. However, he seemed very, […]

We’ve noted for a while how most of the hyperventilation about TikTok is of the manufactured moral panic variety. We’ve also noted how the folks who’ve been the loudest about TikTok’s privacy and security threats spent decades fighting against competent oversight or privacy legislation, yet now want to pretend that banning a single app somehow […]

It’s always fun when the USPTO demonstrates its internal multiple personality disorder on intellectual property concerns. That’s probably a tad harsh; after all, the USPTO is made up of people, and different people will view similar situations differently. Unfortunately, part of what the USPTO is supposed to uphold and set are standards for intellectual property […]