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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 […]

Intego Mac Washing Machine is a Mac cleaner that makes it easy to get rid of junk files that slow down your Mac—duplicate files and programs you never use. It also helps you automatically organize things, so both you and your Mac operate more efficiently. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]

Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well says my impossibility theorem. And, basically every day we see more examples of this in action. The latest is that the NY Times reports how YouTube took down a video that the January 6th House Select Committee had posted to the site, detailing many of the […]

A few years ago the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and slowly raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Republican attempt to legislate against spam filtering of political emails: Nothing new See: The exemption that gave themselves around Texting unsolicited political spam. In second place, it’s another anonymous comment in response to a certain prolific commenter: Hyman has […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, while Diane Feinstein was calling for Section 702 reforms and the EFF was suing the FBI for withholding NSL guideline documents, UK Prime Minister Theresa May was trying to push forward with plans to kill encryption, she and French President Emmanuel Macron were both supporting internet censorship, and […]

I guess it’s time to pay get robbed by the piper. The state of Michigan has periodically enacted forfeiture reforms, often in response to bad press or lawsuit losses. Michigan law enforcement has made the most of forfeiture privileges. Thanks to a reform passed in 2015, the public finally had access to data showing just […]

It’s no secret that the Russian government has been working overtime to try to block out accurate information about its invasion of Ukraine from reaching the citizenry. That’s part of why we found it so frustrating that some supporters of Ukraine sought to make it even more difficult for Russian’s to reach the wider internet. […]

Modern reviewers put modern televisions through a gamut of different tests to determine display brightness, quality, power consumption, and other factors. Samsung, apparently thought it would be a brilliant idea to try and cheat the benchmarking system used by many reviewers to give their TVs an unfair advantage in comparison. First spotted by HDTVTest then […]

California legislators finally lifted the opacity shrouding police misconduct records in early 2019. The new law eliminated exemptions, making police misconduct and use-of-force records available to records requesters for the first time in decades. Full grown adults clothed in uniforms and armed with guns reacted like children. They sued. They shredded records. They pretended they […]

We’ve written a couple times about Andy Parker, whose story is truly tragic. His daughter, a local TV news reporter, was murdered on air by a former colleague, in the middle of a live news broadcast. Truly horrific stuff. Parker has now spent years trying to remove the video of his daughter’s murder from social […]

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There’s plenty of human work to be done, but there never seems to be enough humans to do it. When things need to be processed in bulk, we turn it over to hardware and software. It isn’t better. It isn’t smarter. It’s just faster. We can’t ask humans to process massive amounts of data because […]

The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of […]

Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The […]

Field drug tests are notoriously unreliable. False positives abound. But law enforcement agencies still use them. First and foremost, they use them because no court, policy, or legislation has told them they can’t. But they also use them because they’re cheap (~$2/per), portable, and, most importantly, prone to producing false positives that allow cops to […]

We’ve already discussed how the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court may impact the debate on encryption, but it has a likelihood of impacting lots of other important tech debates as well. Senator Ron Wyden has written a thoughtful piece over at Slate, explaining how important Section 230 is in a […]

Well, this is ugly. Lots of states and cities have considered bail reform in recent years, given the system’s propensity for punishing the poorest people while allowing the more fortunate to buy their way out of jail. The criminal justice system is built on the presumption of innocence — something that’s often ignored by law […]

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The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds. First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better […]

Critics of modern tech often lean towards hyperbole when discussing “surveillance capitalism” and the seemingly omniscient power of advertisers and adtech. In reality, as journalists who cover the space for any amount of time can attest, it’s all frequently much dumber and clumsier than that: A new study, first reported by The Wall Street Journal […]

I have talked for years at Techdirt about how the cord cutting trend, while still continuing, was going to run into a wall due to the way that major sports broadcasts have always been done through cable TV deals. I have also covered the steps, baby or otherwise, different sports leagues and teams have taken […]

The federal judiciary system has pretty much blown off taxpayers’ (and legislators’) complaints about PACER for years. The online system that was supposed to make access to court documents fair and equitable is instead a paywalled, outdated heap of barely functioning junk that charges citizens $0.10/page for questionable search results from PACER’s broken search engine. […]

The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) system needs plenty of useful reforms to actually work correctly and properly. Despite limited time frames in which the government is required to provide information, they often take years. They regularly redact stuff they shouldn’t. Or refuse to hand over documents they are required to. Generally speaking, the […]

Any shift in the balance of power away from law enforcement almost always results in law enforcement claiming we’re headed towards a criminal apocalypse. The NYPD — via union reps and police commissioners — have made these claims for years, targeting everything from “stop and frisk” reform to more recent efforts made to treat accused […]

Okay, so this bill is nowhere near as bad as the Texas and Florida bills, or a number of other bills out there about content moderation. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not pretty damn bad. New York has passed a variation of a content moderation bill in that state that requires websites to have […]

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The government of India continues to pretend it’s a democracy while doing everything it can to satisfy an elected leader who now apparently has aspirations to become “dictator for life.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Mohdi, India has moved away from its democratic ideals and closer to the ideals held by one of its closest neighbors, […]

We’ve noted several times how there are a few reasons why the U.S. government can’t get a handle on robocalls, despite big announcements every six months or so about how they’re cracking down on the practice and really mean it this time. One of the biggest reasons is that neither the discourse, nor our solutions, […]

Funny what a little public shaming can accomplish. It was merely a week or so ago that we were discussing one bakery in California threatening other bakeries for using the term “mochi muffin”, for which the USPTO had somehow granted it a trademark. If you didn’t read the last post and need a quick recap […]