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For decades, local law enforcement agencies have blown off requests from the FBI and DOJ to report use of force incidents by officers. This has led to a very incomplete picture of force deployment in the United States — a form of proxy opacity that has allowed agencies to ignore problematic cops and problematic actions. […]

In our somewhat limited discussions about video game publisher Bungie, our remarks about the company certainly haven’t always been positive. And perhaps that colored my thinking when I recently wrote about a DMCA takedown blitz occurring among the Destiny community, with all kinds of uploads from fans being on the receiving end of takedowns on […]

We [waves flattened palm parallel to the floor in circular motion meant to demonstrate the encompassing nature of the rest of this sentence] the People of this United States have seen some shit. This faaaaaaaaaaarrrr surpasses anything we’ve seen before. By shit, I am referring to the gobsmackingly inane, incredibly insane garbage law enforcement passes […]

One of the striking features of the copyright industry is its insatiability. No matter how long, broad and strong copyright becomes, the copyright world wants it to be yet longer, broader and stronger. It seems companies simply cannot conceive of any point where there is “enough” copyright in the world. A good example is in the […]

Never mind the economy. The real inflation is coming from government agencies seeking to justify their waste of taxpayers’ money. While not otherwise occupied killing state residents with electric grid mismanagement or passing laws restricting their speech, Texas governor Greg Abbott has been touting the success of his personal border surge program — one he […]

Go Vote On the Elite 8! The inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstanding March Madness is getting to crunch time. In the Sweet 16 we had our first number 1 seed fall to a challenger. Here’s the latest bracket: In the Sweet 16 the first major upset happened when HIPAA lost (just barely) to Free Speech. HIPAA […]

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Obviously over the past few years there’s been all of these debates about the content moderation practices of various websites. We’ve written about it a ton, including in our Content Moderation Case Study series (currently on hiatus, but hopefully back soon). The goal of that series was to demonstrate that content moderation is rarely (if […]

Telecom giants are no strangers to helping governments spy on journalists, activists, and their own citizens. AT&T, for example, is effectively so bone-grafted to the NSA here in the States, you literally cannot physically tell where the government ends and the telecom giant begins. Chinese companies like Huawei have also jumped to the head of […]

I guess we can’t have nice things. You know, little things… like adherence to the Fourth Amendment. In Wisconsin, the state’s top court says [PDF] cops don’t need to worry too much about suppressed evidence if there’s another way to acquire it. (via Courthouse News Service) Daniel Van Linn was convicted of driving under the […]

One of the central “justifications” for copyright is that it is indispensable if creativity is to be viable. Without it, we are assured, artists would starve. This ignores the fact that artists created and thrived for thousands of years before the 1710 Statute of Anne. But leaving that historical detail aside, as well as the […]

We’ve noted for a while now how Elon Musk’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn’t going to be the miraculous revolution many people think. For one thing, the service can currently only provide service to a maximum of around 800,000 subscribers globally. For context, around 20-40 million people in the U.S. lack broadband, and 83 […]

Last week, the EU and the US announced something important that sounds pretty boring — a new “privacy shield” agreement. You should know it’s important, because in the midst of dealing with everything else, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden actually made a public statement with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen […]

It appears several legislators haven’t learned anything from the months of anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. What should have provoked a reassessment of law enforcement’s contribution to society, and a closer examination of their means and methods, […]

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Techno moral panics are back in fashion, it seems. There have been multiple (misleading) stories about “kids and social media“, and then there are always attempts to dive into specific “new” services. Last fall, it was all about the kids and their TikTok challenges. But, Tiktok is so last year. So now CNN is back […]

Last week, Reuters broke the quasi-news that Clearview had offered its tech to the war effort in Ukraine. According to statements made solely by the company and its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, the Ukraine government was using Clearview’s 10-billion facial image database (all scraped for free from the open web) to identify dead bodies, point out […]

I’ll give Nintendo this much: the company certainly is an absolute master at enforcing copyright in the most extreme, pettiest manner possible. I’ve already had some fun comparing Nintendo to Disney, in that the way the company is handling shutting down older game stores and making those games no longer available in most places is […]

One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, […]

It seems that each week another ridiculously unconstitutional “content moderation” bill pops up in another state. Beyond the fact that nearly all of these bills are preempted by federal law (and are unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment) it seems that state legislatures feel the need to score political points. And it’s not just one party. […]

The FBI owes its oversight — and the public the oversight serves — plenty of answers. But let’s set our expectations any higher than reality dictates. The FBI is not exactly a paradigm of complicity. Remember “going dark?” Two consecutive FBI directors claimed an insanely large number of locked devices was preventing investigators from investigating. […]

Go Vote On The Sweet Sixteen! Our inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstanding March Madness has been getting lots of buzz (and votes) and now we’re down to just sixteen remaining legal misunderstanding matchups! Some of these are starting to get tough! In round two there were some pretty closer matchups… and some total laughers. Of the […]

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We’ve covered some of the difficulties Trump’s Truth Social is having getting users to actually use the platform, and the same appears to be true for the various other Trumpist Twitter wannabes like Parler and GETTR. NBC News has a somewhat hilarious story in which its reporters went to talk to “conservative influencers” to get […]

U.S. regulatory enforcement and punishment for companies that rip consumers off with sneaky fees is not what you’d call… consistent. For example, the telecom and cable industries have long exploited a wide array of bullshit fees to jack up advertised prices with only fleeting penalties. The same can be said for the banking, airline, hotel, […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come from our post about the cops who killed a drunk driver as he told them at least a dozen times that he couldn’t breathe. In first place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a response to a commenter who tried to wipe away the entire incident […]

So far, in our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we’ve looked at Best Adaptation The Wall Across The River and Best Deep Cut The Obstruction Method. Today, it’s time for the winner of the Best Remix category: Dreaming The Cave by David […]

Once again, here comes the video game industry to do good in the world. Despite being the easy villain for many, including grandstanding politicians, video games and their communities can often be seen doing good for the world. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how one itch.io game bundle was offering thousands of dollars […]

Let’s start this off by noting that I actually think that Elon Musk sometimes receives both too much criticism from some circles and too much praise from others. I think he deserves tremendous praise for taking visions that, at the time, seemed nearly impossible, and then making them real. From electric vehicles with Tesla, to […]

ICE has never really cared about the people it detains and processes for removal. It cared even less when President Trump made it clear he believed anyone less white and privileged than he is deserved to be excluded from the “American dream.” Trump claimed he wanted the “worst of the worst” removed to make America […]

It’s pretty much understood that filming police is protected by the First Amendment. Even in jurisdictions where the highest courts have yet to hand down a definitive decision, police departments have made it clear to officers that filming cops isn’t a crime. This has followed years of jurisprudence and laws being repealed/rewritten to reflect this […]

Very serious laughably ridiculous buffoon stunt journalists, Project Veritas, had its account banned from Twitter a year ago, a couple months before its founder James O’Keefe also had his own account banned as well. O’Keefe vowed to sue CNN and Twitter over the bans, and these plans seem to be going about as well as […]

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Cops and obscenities don’t mix. Don’t get me wrong. Cops love swear words. They’re a huge part of law enforcement’s arsenal when attempting to achieve “control” of a “scene.” This act usually involves contradictory shouted instructions peppered by F-bombs delivered as frequently and quickly as possible. Swearing at people is completely acceptable. But swearing at […]

So we’ve already noted how OAN was booted off of the DirecTV lineup, severing a massive mainstream distribution avenue for the conspiracy and fantasy channel. DirecTV, recently spun off by AT&T, made the decision because the channel, despite all the attention, really wasn’t being watched very much. Angry that a major source of GOP propaganda […]

When someone asks me what DRM is, my answer is very simple: it’s anti-piracy software that generally doesn’t stop pirates at all, and, instead, mostly only annoys legitimate buyers. Well, then why do software and video game companies use it at all? Couldn’t tell you. Businesses really want to annoy their own customers? Apparently, yes. […]

“I can’t breathe.“ Those are words universally recognized as an expression of respiratory distress. Unless you’re a cop. Then they’re perceived as, at best, non-compliance. At worst, they’re perceived as active resistance. “I can’t breathe,” many people have told the officers currently choking the life out of them. In most documented cases, these people have […]

The European Union is working on a number of important new digital laws. These includes the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the Data Act. A new press release about the last of these contains the following section: the Data Act reviews certain aspects of the Database Directive, which was created in the 1990s to protect investments in […]

We just wrote about Senators Leahy and Tillis and their “SMART Copyright Act” and its dangerously problematic setup, that would enable Hollywood to petition the Copyright Office to get what it has long desired: mandatory upload filters for websites hosting 3rd party content. Professor Eric Goldman has explained how this bill is “a thinly veiled […]

Round Two is happening right now. Go vote! Well, our inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstanding March Madness is off to quite a start. Round one ended with most of the matchups getting thousands of votes, so now we’re on to round two. You can still see the official bracket to see how it matches up with […]

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Formed less than a month after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the TSA has yet to get a firm grip on “transportation security,” the thing that makes up two-thirds of its acronym. Audit after audit has found TSA screeners are incapable of finding explosives and other dangerous contraband. If auditors can rack up a 90-95% […]

For literally more than a decade researchers have been warning that global satellite telecommunications networks were vulnerable to all manner of attacks. These attacks vary in nature but allow an intruder miles away to both intercept and disrupt satellite communications. In 2020 hackers again clearly demonstrated how these perpetually unresolved vulnerabilities were putting millions of […]

We’ve been making the point for years that the way copyright is currently enforced in online platforms is wide open for abuse and error. Between all the collateral damage created by automated copyright bots and all of the chicanery used to silence critics or to baselessly collect revenue on the work of others, there is […]

A Glendale (AZ) police officer (now former police officer… more on that in a bit) isn’t going to be able to walk away from a civil rights lawsuit stemming from excessive force he deployed during a routine traffic stop. An Arizona federal court says there’s enough in dispute that Officer Matt Schneider will have to […]

Generally, when you talk about disinformation or propaganda, “big tech” companies like Facebook, or media giants like Fox News get the lion’s share of the attention. But as we’ve long noted, local news outlets in the U.S. were hollowed out years ago and replaced with something that looks like news, but is generally just gibberish […]

Earlier this week, the Biden administration urged companies to protect against potential cyberattacks from Russia, which seems like pretty good advice: The Biden-Harris Administration has warned repeatedly about the potential for Russia to engage in malicious cyber activity against the United States in response to the unprecedented economic sanctions we have imposed. There is now […]

Fresh off its fining by the Italian government for breaking privacy laws (which followed several similar actions by other governments), the facial recognition tech company, that is so odious other facial recognition tech companies want nothing to do with it, is claiming it’s pitching in on the Ukraine war effort. “It will (finally) be used […]

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Let me introduce you to Alaska state Senator Lori Reinbold, who insists in her profile that she believes “in smaller government, and an economy based on free market principles.” She also says that she takes her oath to defend the Constitution “seriously and will fight to protect our inalienable rights.” And apparently, the way she […]