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Always great to see another law enforcement officer weaponize his job by letting his politics motivate his actions. We recently saw this in Ohio, when Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski sent out a Facebook post telling residents to write down the addresses of people with Kamala Harris signs in their yards. I'm not going to call this [...]

Support us on Patreon It's been a few weeks, but we're back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we've got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today's. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for [...]

I get that a lot of people don't like the big AI companies and how they scrape the web. But these copyright lawsuits being filed against them are absolute garbage. And you want that to be the case, because if it goes the other way, it will do real damage to the open web by [...]

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Well, these entities deserve each other. The problem is we really don't deserve either of them. Trump spent a lot of his campaign touting a logistical nightmare of a policy that sounded a lot like an collapse-of-the-Weimar-Republic sort of thing: the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, whether they're here legally or not. All that's [...]

Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump's likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He's likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T's and Comcast's asses, Carr's widely considered [...]

As the saying goes, the arc of morale judgment is long, but it does bend towards justice. And even if we accept such an optimistic worldview is relevant in this year of our lord, 2024, that certainly doesn't mean we can't bitch about how long that damned arc is. It's been over two years since [...]

The case against Backpage was built on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the internet works. But that didn't stop the government from destroying the company and its founders' lives. Over the last few years, we've written about how the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked [...]

As Techdirt stories attest, Wikipedia has been attacked in the past for publishing true information that somebody doesn't like. As well as wanting articles to be censored, those behind such attacks often also demand the names of those who worked on the article. Something similar is now happening in India, where the Indian news agency [...]

Never underestimate the amount of effort law enforcement officers will expend to dispense as much cruelty as possible. And never forget these are the people we are expected to believe are actually there to protect and serve. While it's great there's a settlement payment on the way, the fact is that this extremely vindictive and [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

The first shot to use Section 230 to force adversarial interoperability on platforms has hit a setback. Earlier this year, we wrote about an absolutely fascinating lawsuit that was an attempt to activate a mostly-ignored part of Section 230 in a really interesting way. Most people know about Section 230 for its immunity protections for [...]

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it's generally cheaper (assuming you don't sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim. But the party simply isn't poised to last. Thanks to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Arianity with a comment about Bezos's endorsement gambit backfiring: In second place, it's an anonymous reply to someone defending Trump's lawsuit against CBS: Alright. Let's see every trump interview over his life released in full and uncensored. For editor's choice on the insightful side, [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we noted how the FCC's freakout about Huawei was out of step with the way it ignored the internet of broken things. We were not shocked to learn ISPs were cutting back 2020 investment plans despite all the tax breaks and the death of net neutrality, and not [...]

If you've followed along with our coverage on the hit video game Palworld, developed by Pocketpair, you will know that Nintendo and the Pokemon Co. has sued Pocketpair for patent infringement. Prior to the suit, there had been a ton of speculation that a lawsuit would be filed, but that it would be a copyright [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

The narrative for years has been that social media companies - most of them headquartered in California - have it in for conservatives. While the real problem tends to be actual Nazis, conservatives who feel their bigoted views have been censored" continue to pretend West Coast liberals and the Biden Administration are to blame for [...]

If the government passes a law that infringes on the public's free speech rights, how should one challenge the law? As recent events have shown, the answer is more complex than many realized. A few years ago, both Texas and Florida passed social media content moderation" laws, which would both limit how social media platforms [...]

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It's the sort of thing we see a lot of: a government gets caught doing something wrong and decides it's the public that needs to suffer for the government's sins. So it goes in the African island nation of Mauritius, which got caught engaging in presumably illegal surveillance. The only reason residents know this is [...]

We've well established that theAT&T->Time Warner->Discoveryseries of media mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by the extraction class. The utterly senseless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than50,000 people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands (like Mad Magazine and HBO), createdoceans of animosity [...]

I won't pretend like I'm not a huge fan of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has done great work representing clients on matters of free speech and technology innovation. Whether it's defending anonymous speech from being unmasked or fighting back against the use of intellectual property laws merely to hide content from daylight, this [...]

The die is cast. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House - a remarkable victory. But a lot of people who work in the adult entertainment industry are understandably scared. From the concerns for LGBTQ+ rights under the new Trump presidency to access to reproductive care at a state and national level, the [...]

In 2022, three companies with strange names and no clear business purpose beyond patent litigation filed dozens of lawsuits in Delaware federal court, accusing businesses of all sizes of patent infringement. Some of these complaints claimed patent rights over basic aspects of modern life; one, for example, involved apatent that pertains to the process of [...]

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The American people have spoken. And they've chosen to hand the full power of our military, the nuclear codes, and the courts to a petty, vindictive man who wants to punish anyone who disagrees with him. I'm not going to say much directly about the election this week, because what is there that I can [...]

For years we've noted how U.S. broadband isexpansive, patchy, and slowthanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, andcity-owned utilitiesbuilding their own, locally-owned broadband networks in a bid forbetter, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could [...]

Here we go again. We've been discussing the iterative changes in Japanese copyright law for some time now. Those changes have been largely targeted rather than sweeping, though those targeted changes are arguably extreme in nature. First and foremost was moving copyright infringement largely out of the realm of civil law and into a criminal [...]

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that [...]

It remains incredible to me that we sometimes have to rely on the nutty Fifth Circuit to correct the even nuttier MAGA favorite" judges who issue the stupidest decisions in court cases. But now they've done it again, as the Fifth Circuit has pointed out that, no, RFK Jr. does not appear to have standing [...]

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This is tentatively welcome news. I mean, it can't result in anything worse than the original decision the Fourth Circuit handed down in the Chatrie case, which said there's nothing constitutionally wrong with searching every Google user's location info in hopes of finding the suspect law enforcement is actually looking for. (via FourthAmendment.com) The Appeals [...]

Recent Supreme Court rulingshave thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. Thedismantling of Chevron,with the Loper Bright ruling in particular, now dictates that regulators can't implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress. Two problems: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn't have (think about Ted [...]

Those of you who are video game fanatics like me know the feeling. There's a brand new gaming console on the way and every couple of days you do some googling for updates, release dates, or any kind of news on it. The manufacturers of these consoles often do a drip campaign when it comes [...]

Here's a final election day story. This time, it's about an election integrity" app being used by MAGA folks to spread absolute nonsense about the election, but also to confess their own illegal voter suppression schemes. And thanks to their crap security, it's now being reported. At a time when the facts-optional GOP likes to [...]

Bad people make good case law. That's just how our criminal justice system works. And so it is here in this decision, which flows from criminal charges that, in turn, flow from proactive efforts meant to thwart the sharing of child sexual abuse material. In this case, Ryan Maher was convicted of CSAM possession. Having [...]

When it comes to Section 230, we've seen a parade of embarrassingly wrong takes over the years, all sharing one consistent theme: the authors confidently opine on the law despite clearly not understanding it. Each time I think we've hit bottom with the most ridiculously wrong take, along comes another challenger. This week's is a [...]

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Like a bunch of other states run by people who hate the people they serve (except for the people who harbor the same hatred), Tennessee has decided it should get into the book-banning business - years after literal Nazis made this sort of thing politically untenable. Or so we thought. Now, before the pedants step [...]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a giant U.S. telecom monopoly has been ripping off a federal program designed to help the country's low income residents. AT&T last week quietly struck a $2.3 million consent decreewith the FCC for falsely inflating the number of people it was helping under a COVID-era program designed [...]

For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans' celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of [...]

RT, formerly Russia Today, has appeared a few times here on Techdirt. As the long article about RT on Wikipedia explains, the TV channel has morphed from an attempt to create a state-supported international news network along the lines of the BBC or France 24, but one that offered a Russian perspective on the world, [...]

Donald Trump just took his war on the free press to a new level of absurdity, filing an FEC complaint against the Washington Post for - wait for it - promoting its own reporting. Apparently, Bezos' attempt to appease the MAGA crowd with his endorsement cop-out didn't do the trick. We had warned Jeff Bezos [...]

I have no particular interest in the British royal family, but nevertheless I'll be forever grateful to Princess Kate for telling the world about her cancer. It was probably not easy, nor likely her preference, to be so public at such a difficult moment. But whether she knows it or not, by sharing her story [...]

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As we head into the election tomorrow, there has been some general talk about how many people think that Donald Trump is somehow better on things like free speech and the economy. It's pretty clear that that is wrong. On the economy, it's evident he has no clue what he's talking about and his plan [...]

I've written for years about how U.S. broadband isexpansive, patchy, and slowthanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, andcity-owned utilitiesbuilding their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid forbetter, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Jeff Bezos shutting down the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. In first place, it's a simple anonymous summary: Yep. The message he sent is that he will control what is or is not published. In second place, it's another [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company's facial recognition tech [...]