Techdirt

When your rap track diss battle ends in whiny proto-SLAPP suits, I'm going to suggest you've officially lost. If you ever want to see this dril tweet as a legal filing (two actually), I think it's in Drake's semi-SLAPPy demands for discovery and depositions from Universal Music, Spotify, and iHeartRadio for having the temerity to... [...]

After literally decades of rumor and speculation, fading satellite TV companies Dish and DirecTV finally recently announced they had proposed a pointless merger in a last gasp for relevance. Once blocked by regulatory worries about competitive impact, executives at both companies had long dreamed of combining the two companies into one, still broadly unremarkable company. [...]

It's been over a year since we last talked about the trademark dispute between Katy Perry, the American pop star, and Katie Perry, an Australian woman with a fashion line. To bring you up to speed, and I'll use first names here to keep the confusion at a minimum, Katy sold merchandise for her 2014 [...]

I come here not to bury this Wired article, nor to damn it with faint praise. I come to critique it, while realizing the framing and (especially!) the headline may not be the direct responsibility of its author, Paresh Dave. Privacy laws are hit and miss in the United States. Mostly miss. There's not a [...]

Support us on Patreon Last week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users, our new card game where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. As is tradition when we launch a new game, myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin joined Mike on an episode of the [...]

Way back in the day (1971, to be precise), the Supreme Court created a cause of action to sue federal officers over rights violations. The original case, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, involved Webster Bivens and the warrantless search of his Brooklyn home by FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics - the precursor to the [...]

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You'll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It's on sale [...]

Last week we launched the Kickstarter for our amazing new card game, One Billion Users. It's a fast, fun card game where players try to build up the biggest and best social media network, while simultaneously trying to undermine the networks the other players are trying to build. In the campaign, we mentioned a couple [...]

We've noted more than once that the 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies to the states. A lot of that money will be thrown in the lap of incumbents with long histories of empty promises, but a lot of it will be leveraged for genuine, major improvements in broadband [...]

There isn't a ton of new information here to get into, but we might as well close the loop on this episode. Way back during the 2020 Presidential campaign, then-President Donald Trump's reelection campaign put out an admittedly humorous animated video showing a massive Trump train barreling down the tracks, only to have Joe Biden [...]

Making the bold assumption their voting bloc could read, Louisiana legislators passed a law earlier this year that mandates the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Building on the inexplicable support of people who would find Trump's actions and statements reprehensible if they were carried out by anyone else, legislators are [...]

Whether you like the results or not, there's no denying that the EU's GDPR legislation has tackled a wide range of privacy problems in the online world. Other countries around the globe - including the US - may lack comparable national legislation but there are alternative ways of protecting people's privacy, as a recent ruling [...]

You can't trust cops around your personal info, data, communications, or pretty much anything. Officers have a lot of power and access to plenty of databases filled with personal info. They abuse this power and access frequently. Here's some (recent) historical perspective. In July 2024, a female police officer was awarded a $1 million settlement [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking [...]

What stupid times we live in. President-elect Donald Trump has ordered Republicans to kill a widely-supported bipartisan journalism shield law that would protect press freedom and whistleblowers. Many people voted for Donald Trump on the false belief that he would protect free speech." But in reality, nearly every instinct he has is to stifle free [...]

Look: I think it was nice for a change that the Biden administration at least paid some passing but inconsistent lip service to antitrust reform. It was a lovely change of pace from decades of feckless careerists who pay empty lip service to market innovation while rubber stamping mindless consolidation at every turn. And a [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Elon Musk's hypocrisy on the subject of boycotts: Advertisers fleeing Twitter aren't even boycotting it. They're just each making their own decisions for themselves. A boycott is a group action in the group's longer-term interest, even if it is against [...]

This week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. We've put a lot of work into designing a fun, fast-paced game and we need your help to produce it - so if you want to try your [...]

It's amazing just how many of the trademark disputes we see and discuss here at Techdirt ultimately result from the USPTO granting trademarks that never should have been granted in the first place. In the food industry specifically, we saw this recently in the whole Taco Tuesday" episode, in which the Trademark Office granted Taco [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

I rarely log into Facebook these days, but I happened to do so last week and was a bit surprised to see this pop up saying that an advertising post we had put up for the VPN service CyberGhost nearly a decade ago had to be removed: That's a notice saying that Facebook had removed [...]

This is just what I needed to read after a post-election hell week or two. The city of Los Angeles has gone past exhaustion to vindictive irritation after being sued by the same cops it employs because it (legally) handed over photos and names of LAPD officers to journalist Ben Camacho. Ben Camacho then shared [...]

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton loves to preach about free speech" and free markets"-except, apparently, when it comes to his political allies. In a stunningly hypocritical and authoritarian move, Paxton has launched an investigation" to bully advertisers who have chosen not to support Elon Musk's troubled ExTwitter platform. This is a chilling attack on both [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

This stop may not have been all that pretextual - after all, the officer clocked the driver doing 69 mph in a 55 mph speed limit - but it swiftly turned pretextual for reasons the officer couldn't competently explain. And that's what cost the officer (and the prosecution) their evidence. Back in 2015, the Supreme [...]

Here we go again. Many years ago, we wrote about how one sports psychologist, Dr. Keith Bell, filed a copyright lawsuit against a college over a retweet. Specifically, the retweet included an image of a single page from Bell's book, Winning Isn't Normal. These suits are nonsense, of course, as a retweet is not the [...]

U.S. consumer protection has been beaten to a pulp over the last few decades. Consumer protection regulators are routinely on the ropes, left understaffed, underfunded, and boxed in by an increasingly corrupt and radical 5th Circuit and Supreme Courts stocked with Trump sycophants. One bright spot, however, has been the right to reform" movement, or [...]

Somehow, Hertz continues to be an ongoing concern, in both senses of the word. The company that made itself infamous by repeatedly trying to get innocent renters arrested for car theft tried to put all of that behind it with a $168 million class-action lawsuit settlement in 2022. The company then pledged to do better [...]

Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. This version is designed for PCs that need a new license for Windows [...]

For years, a vocal group of self-described contrarian" Substackified pundits warned about a supposed censorship industrial complex" involving collusion between the White House and social media companies to set content moderation policies. There was just one problem: it wasn't even close to true. Now, with Elon Musk owning ExTwitter and Donald Trump heading back to [...]

While the concept has been endlessly demonized by right wing media (working hand in moist hand with shitty companies like AT&T and Comcast), net neutrality was always well intentioned. It was, in essence, some inconsistent, rarely enforced rules to try and prevent regional broadband monopolies from abusing their regional broadband monopolies to rip off consumers [...]

When we and others discussed the massive trademark lawsuit between Molson Coors, makers of Keystone beer amongst other brands, and Stone Brewing, it was billed as a David versus Goliath scenario. Now, if I remember my bible studies correctly, once David slung a couple of well-placed rocks into Goliath's forehead, Goliath didn't then get up [...]

It looks like Dallas, Texas residents aren't going to wait around for the courts to react to marijuana legalization. They've (overwhelmingly) decided to answer one of the legal questions legalization creates by adding the answer to the ballot measure itself. (h/t Jacob Sullum, Reason) Shall the Dallas City Charter be amended by adding a new [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got another cross-post for you this week, and this time it's also a live panel recording. Recently, Mike joined a panel at Boston University Questrom School of Business which was recorded for WBUR's Is Business Broken? podcast, alongside professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Nadine Strossen, and moderated by host Curt [...]

Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, patents are not a measure of innovation, nor are they needed for companies to thrive - something even Elon Musk understands. But one aspect of patents that is rarely considered is their morality. The European Patent Office's Board of Appeal wrestled with this issue in an interesting case involving [...]

It should be clear by now that being a fan of one particular politician doesn't make you a member of a protected" group. It's just a stupid as cops claiming they should be given more rights and protections because people just don't seem to be showering them with unconditional love in recent years. Wearing clothing [...]

You have likely heard that Donald Trump has nominated conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his next Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is dangerous and cruel for a very long list of reasons, but his nomination also exposes the critical flaws in a bill proposed by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben [...]

We noted earlier this week how Trump had unsurprisingly picked Brendan Carr to head the FCC. We also pointed out how Carr's policies" are utterly indistinguishable from the interests of unpopular telecom and media giants like Comcast and AT&T. He's going to demolish whatever's left of the FCC's consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, [...]

If this sounds familiar, sadly, it is. Three years ago, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court somehow arrived at the conclusion that tasing someone soaked in gasoline - an act of escalation that not only killed the suicidal person officers were supposed to rescuing but also burned the entire residence to the ground - was not [...]

Whatever your politics, there can be no arguing that the election of Donald Trump once more to the highest office in the land has served as a permission slip for some of the worst people in the country to behave badly. We're already seeing this in all sorts of ways, from incel fuckwits telling women [...]

Alfred Robert (A.R.) Quinton was an English watercolor artist, famed for his stunning paintings of British landscapes and villages. Following along a professional artist with more than 35 years of experience, the Learn to Paint Course will guide you through painting A.R. Quinton's Scenes with watercolor and enhancing them using pastel pencils. From the sky [...]

Elon Musk's ExTwitter has filed an important First Amendment lawsuit against California over its unconstitutional law regulating deepfakes. This follows Musk's earlier successful challenge to the state's social media transparency" law. Yes, sometimes Elon Musk actually does file good First Amendment cases that help protect free speech. I'm just as amazed as anyone, but it's [...]

We're excited to announce the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game: One Billion Users. In this fast-paced and entertaining card game, you take on the role of a social media mogul competing to build the most successful social network. We've spent much of this year designing, testing, and refining the game [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers' unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games into the public domain [...]

Cops like to pretend they're winning the war on sex trafficking. Whether or not there's enough sex trafficking to justify law enforcement expenditures is, at best, still an open question. And most sex trafficking operations tend to end with the arrest of the people they're supposed to be saving: the sex workers. Then there are [...]

Earlier this year, California passed SB 976, yet another terrible and obviously unconstitutional bill with the moral panicky title Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act." The law restricts minors' access to social media and imposes burdensome requirements on platforms. It is the latest in a string of misguided attempts by California lawmakers to [...]

Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation's top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there's zero daylight between Carr's policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of regulatory capture" as you're going to [...]

Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD investigators" spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn't been committed... by anybody. After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. - who suffers from several health and mental [...]