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Even though the blog is now often given over to Trump did nothing wrong" posts and suggestions that social media services engage in censorship" of so-called conservatives" (and don't even think about wandering into the comment section), Eugene Volokh's Volokh Conspiracy still surfaces some very interesting cases. And this one has a lot going on. [...]

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On Monday, Elon Musk tweeted To fear parody or criticism is a sign of weakness." If true, then this is Elon admitting to an astounding level of weakness. I mean, we've been chronicling for nearly two years now how Elon Musk talks a good game on free speech, but at every opportunity he's had, he [...]

It's extremely weird that we've somehow normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, and marketers have made the U.S.' primary voice communication platform largely unusable. There is some good news: according to data from the YouMail Robocall Index, U.S. consumers received just under 3.8 billion robocalls during the month of December, a 16.3% decrease [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about the dangerous protect the children" ballot initiative in California: That is not a protect the children law, that is an I hate social media and it must be destroyed law. In second place, it's Blake Stacey passing on the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at how Ajit Pai's FCC often battled FOIA requests for no reason, while the Department of the Interior was trying to rewrite FOIA law to make it easier to reject requests. We saw fresh examples of copyright abuse as a means of silencing criticism of a [...]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has something of a rollercoaster history when it comes to the enforcement of its real, or perceived, intellectual property rights. On the one hand, the church has occasionally been quite lenient when it comes to not trying to battle every use of its name, traditions, or religious [...]

Dating can be difficult, but there are certain things you can do to not make things worse on yourself. Don't be a creep. Be kind. Take no for an answer. Actually listen to the people you date. I mean, that's kinda the standard stuff. But also, if things go bad and they complain about you [...]

Everyone's aware (or should be) that all calls made from jail are monitored. Not all calls are recorded. There are exceptions, with the biggest being the one for calls made to attorneys representing jailed people. Those are completely off-limits. These are privileged communications that cannot be monitored or recorded by the government. And yet, it [...]

It's pretty amazing to me just how wrong one Senator can be about the internet for years and years and years. But we've been writing about Senator Richard Blumenthal and never, ever letting his own confusion about the internet get in the way of him boldly making foolish claims about the internet since before he [...]

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There are lots of things you can call veteran Cincinnati police officer Ryan Olthaus. Some people called him a racist, after he appeared to flash the ok" sign (something associated with [but not limited to] white supremacists) at anti-police violence protesters. You can also call him a coward. After all, he couldn't be bothered to [...]

We've long noted how the U.S. has generally proven too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law or regulate data brokers. The result has been a long line of companies that over-collect all manner of sensitive consumer location and behavior data, fail to secure it, and sell access to it to pretty much any [...]

The bad times for Unity continue, it seems. Or, at the very least, for the ostensibly hardworking men and women that called the company home. The bad times really began late last summer when Unity decided to drastically change its pricing scheme both for future projects that used the game engine, and, somehow, retroactively as [...]

A law passed last year has now taken effect in California. This attempt to limit pretextual stops and biased policing means California law enforcement officers will no longer be able to start every traffic stop with an impromptu Q&A session. They'll have to get right to the point. Here's what the law says: (a) A [...]

In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live this week, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to [...]

Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things. About that. [...]

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Law enforcement officers learned long ago that if all they have is a crime scene and no likely suspects, there was no reason to wear out shoe leather beating the streets for alleged criminals. They don't even need to leave the office. All they have to do is produce a subpoena for certain third-party records [...]

Hewlett Packard (HP) has been socked with yet another lawsuit for crippling the printers of consumers who use cheaper third-party ink cartridges. The lawsuit, filed by eleven plaintiffs in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, states that HP misleadingly used its Dynamic Security" firmware updates to create a monopoly" over replacement printer [...]

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, [...]

Public records requesters in California recently scored a small victory in one of the state's appeals courts. The EFF, which filed an amicus brief in this case, summarizes the decision at its website. Video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public, a California [...]

Last year, soon after Elon completed his purchase of (then) Twitter, I wrote up a 20 level speed run" of the content moderation learning curve. It seems like maybe some of the folks at Substack should be reading it these days? As you'll recall, last April, Substack CEO Chris Best basically made it clear that [...]

December was not just busy with Supreme Court briefs. The Copia Institute also joined many others, including copyright scholars and public interest organizations, in filing an amicus brief to support the Internet Archive's appeal at the Second Circuit, seeking to overturn the troubling ruling holding its Open Library to be copyright infringement. We've written about [...]

Things are still batshit insane in the Florida legislature. Again. Apparently, the state's government won't be satisfied until it's attempted to violate every single constitutional amendment (except the 2nd!) via godawful bills crafted by godawful people. The latest insanity is a bill [PDF] written by state senator Jason Brodeur. It aims to completely rewrite defamation [...]

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On Tuesday morning, former politician Tulsi Gabbard, who had to have the 1st Amendment clearly explained to her by a judge after she filed a ridiculous lawsuit to restrict the free speech of others, announced that she had cut a deal with Elon Musk to bring a news show" to ExTwitter. Hilariously, she claimed that [...]

Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows [...]

As all manner of content creators will tell us, copyright enforcement is both very important and is at least doable enough that it sure would be nice if platforms like YouTube could do even more to enforce those rights for content creators. This mantra will typically come from those that are the most aggressive and [...]

Across the nation, bigoted politicians (of the Republican variety, almost exclusively) are trying to punish and silence content and expression they don't like. It's not like it's even a close question about who's doing this and why. A slew of bills targeting drag shows and LGBTQ+ writing have been tossed into legislatures all over the [...]

We're back from the holidays, and it's time for a new episode of the Techdirt Podcast! This week, we're joined by Ravi Iyer, Research Director for the USC Marshall School's Neely Center and Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, to discuss a proposed design code" that aims to make social media better serve [...]

There's plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay's accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard's plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don't actually care about plagiarism, only scalping" Gay. What's more, their own plagiarism accusations have [...]

It was a busy December for the Copia Institute (and me), even just at the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to filing (along with Bluesky and Mastodon admin Chris Riley) an amicus brief supporting NetChoice and CCIA in their combined cases, we also filed another one challenging the bizarre injunction imposed by the Fifth Circuit [...]

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Go NetChoice go. The trade group has been going around the country and blocking all the bad state level social media laws. Early on (with CCIA) it sued to stop Texas and Florida's problematic laws. Last year it sued successfully to stop laws in Arkansas and California. Just a few weeks ago it sued Utah [...]

Early last year new journalism outlet named The Messenger" launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing anda lot of chatterabout how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism. Finkelstein claimed he wanted to build an alternative to a national [...]

Nearly four years ago, we discussed the online superhero game City of Heroes, which had been shut down officially by NCSoft, but which had survived in the shadows due to some fan-run servers. That story from 2019 was fairly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it stood in contrast to some similar instances where [...]

Between the holidays, and to minimal fanfare, the FCC released a decision in the 2018 Quadrennial Review of Media Ownership policy. The timing of the release was no surprise, as the agency had been ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to conclude the proceeding by December 27th. The FCC's decision, which made only [...]

As most of you will readily recall, last summer there was quite a lot of attention paid to a case involving a lawyer who had submitted a brief in a personal injury case that had a whole bunch of made up case citations. After this was brought to the attention of the judge, the lawyer [...]

Just when it finally looked like the FBI's year of abuse might catch up to it, it (along with the NSA and other beneficiaries of this surveillance authority) has been granted a four-month reprieve. The FBI made a lot of enemies with its continuous abuse of this surveillance authority - a foreign-facing collect it all" [...]

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Over the last few years we've pointed out time and time again that the evidence regarding the supposed harm" of social media to teen mental health just isn't supported by the data. But it seems it's never enough to stop savior-complex folks in the media, the advocacy community, and the political class from insisting it [...]

Back in 2019, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge proudly declared that the trend of cord cutting - or people ditching traditional cable television and switching to streaming - was finally coming to an end. According to Rutledge, the worst was now behind the cable industry, and the trend was finally slowing down. Yeah, about that. According [...]

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to worrisome ruling in California that denied Section 230 protections to Snapchat because it has disappearing messages. In first place, it's radix with thoughts on the potential implications: I can't wait for every document shredding company to be swept up in every [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we kicked off the new year with a copyright lawsuit over dance moves in Fortnite, while the EU made its first attempt at listing pirate sites and included a bunch of non-infringing sites. Similarly, we looked at how antipiracy outfits routinely claim copyright infringement against sites that simply [...]

I'm always heartened to see another local news team start digging into asset forfeiture. Especially the ones that don't sugarcoat the findings with headlines that read like they were crafted by law enforcement officials. Charlotte, North Carolina's NBC affiliate, WCNC, tells it like it is. Although it puts quotes around a couple of phrases, it [...]

It's no secret that there are mountains of examples of companies and individuals attempting to use intellectual property laws merely to silence critics and disappear information from the internet. While I'm sure this sort of thing must somtimes work, it's also quite common for these would-be censorial folks to be introduced to the Streisand Effect [...]

The technological marvel of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, developed by AI engineers and experts, has posed a unique challenge in the realm of copyright law. These advanced AI systems, which undergo extensive training on diverse datasets, including copyrighted material, and provide output highly dependent on user prompts," have raised questions about the bounds [...]

The banal will never capture as much attention as the lurid. I'm sure that this opening sentence will be seized upon by the many critics of my posts criticizing cops. So be it. Just be aware that we expect our public servants to be banal at almost any cost. That's a sign of competence and [...]

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