Techdirt

Late last year, we discussed how the FTC had appealed the court's decision to allow Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard to move forward. I said at the time that I don't think this appeal is going anywhere, and I still don't thanks to the general toothless nature of regulators in America, but the FTC has [...]

Can't say we didn't warn everyone. Last summer we pointed out that Sarah Silverman and a bunch of other authors suing AI companies for copyright infringement seemed to only demonstrate that they didn't understand how copyright works. And, now Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, has dismissed most of the claims in three related cases from authors against [...]

As lots of folks are reporting, Senator Richard Blumenthal, this morning, released an updated version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). He and co-author Senator Marsha Blackburn are also crowing how they've now increased the list of co-sponsors to 62 Senators, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz among others. Blumenthal, as he always [...]

Cops shouldn't be able to arrest you for saying things to them, even if they're things they don't like. But it still happens with alarming frequency. This is unconstitutional retaliation. But even if courts admit that much, if this retaliation doesn't match up with the facts of a previous case they've handled, they'll acknowledge the [...]

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What is going on at Wired Magazine? A few years ago, the magazine went on a bit of a binge with some articles that completely misrepresented Section 230. While I felt those articles were extraordinarily misleading, at least they seemed to mostly live in the world of facts. Its latest piece goes so far beyond [...]

Every few weeks for the last 20 years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe authoritarian era, Congress refuses to pass [...]

And here we go again. I have spent some time pointing out that the Xbox team has demonstrated an unfortunate inability to properly communicate both internally and externally about its various plans. Whether it comes to how it's going to handle exclusives, game ports, or just the overall direction of the division's plans, what comes [...]

The colossal catastrophe that is the Marion County PD's raid of a small town newspaper's offices (along with a raid of the home of its 98-year-old co-owner [who died shortly thereafter]) continues to generate national (and international!) headlines. The PD claimed this was all above-board. Supposedly computer crime laws were broken by local journalists when [...]

Makers of new smart" technologies keen on reinventing the wheel keep inadvertently sending the same message: sometimes dumber technology is smarter. The latest case in point: a company named Livall makes smart" bike helmets for skiers and cyclists that includes features like auto-fall detection, GPS location monitoring, and integrated braking lights. The problem: the company [...]

As you may recall, almost two years ago, Elon Musk announced, somewhat out of the blue, that he had accumulated somewhere close to 10% of Twitter's equity, making him the single largest shareholder, and kicking off a chain of bizarre events that eventually put him in charge of the platform that he has rapidly driven [...]

London is covered with cameras. They're everywhere people are. That includes the London Underground, the city's massive subway system. But these days, it's not enough to have thousands of unblinking, passive eyes watching Londoners go about their days. AI is the special sauce. Facial recognition is pretty much a given in London. Added to the [...]

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It never ends. We just wrote about Ohio having its parental consent/age verification" bill tossed out as unconstitutional, and pointed out that it is the latest in a long series of similar bills being declared unconstitutional. The internet/kid bills are a bipartisan mess, as legislatures dominated by both parties have passed similar bills, and all [...]

AI" (or more accurately language learning models nowhere close to sentience or genuine awareness) has plenty of innovative potential. Unfortunately, most of the folks actually in charge of the technology's deployment largely see it as a way to cut corners, attack labor, and double down on all of their very worst impulses. Case in point: [...]

There's that old saying that goes something like: when you've dug yourself into a hole, the very first thing you have to do is stop digging. Or, if you're Trader Joe's, you tell the foreman to hold your beer and grab the shovel to get back to work. Last summer, the grocer decided to take [...]

Prior restraint but it's a law. Everyone saw this coming. Marsy's Laws" began popping up all over the nation, written to prevent the naming of crime victims, especially when the victims were minors. It was perceived as a way to protect victims' privacy and, hopefully, head off harassment from the not-inconsequential portion of humanity that [...]

As we've written about repeatedly, efforts to protect kids online and improve their mental health at the moment all seem to be focused on taking social media away from them, even though all the evidence suggests this would be harmful, not helpful. Today, we're joined by Rob Morris, who aims to take a different approach [...]

Earlier this year, we wrote about about another free speech absolutist" and Elon Musk buddy (and investor in ExTwitter), Bill Ackman threatening to file a SLAPP suit over reporting he didn't like. He's still promising such a lawsuit against Business Insider, and when it comes, it seems unlikely to succeed. He's yet to show any [...]

Well, NSO Group really made a mess of this for everyone. Ever since the devastating leak showing its customers routinely targeted journalists, government critics, dissidents, and human rights activists (you know, rather than the violent criminals and terrorists they said they'd use the spyware to track), things have gone from bad to worse to career-ending [...]

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Writer Seamas O'Reilly published his weekly column at the Irish Examiner on Saturday, talking about how spam, scams, and manipulation attempts are flooding the internet. It's a good article and well worth reading, basically just talking about the proliferation of nonsense online, much of which includes scammers trying to steal money from people. Here's just [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

Usually when I write about trademark disputes, it's at least the case that if I really squint at an accuser's claims, or perhaps hit myself in the head with a hammer for several minutes, I can at least see their perspective in a dispute. I may still call the whole thing very stupid, as is [...]

Last month we wrote about Netchoice suing Ohio over its Parental Notification by Social Media Act," in which I filed a declaration highlighting how problematic the law would be for a site like Techdirt. By the time we'd finished the article about the lawsuit, a federal judge had already granted a temporary injunction, blocking the [...]

Stop-start. Push-pull. Yank-tug. That's the way things have been going in the UK. One would expect better performance from lawmakers with a hard-on for porn. No. Not that way. (Although, maybe that way.) The UK government has spent several years trying to talk service providers, recalcitrant legislators, and the general public into trading away a [...]

In the fall of 2022 an apparent investor in a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Latinum" sued the guy behind the currency, Donald Basile. You can see the whole case here. There has been a bunch of back and forth on the docket, but it appears the remaining parties at some point went to binding arbitration. Soon [...]

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Last fall, we detailed the many, many, many, many problems of Elon Musk's absolutely bullshit ridiculous lawsuit against Media Matters. Again, if you don't recall, Media Matters found some examples of neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter appearing next to ads from big name brands. Elon got extra mad about this because it also happened a day [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about Elon Musk funding a SLAPP suit against Disney, responding piece by piece to another commenter: According to MM, every lawsuit by someone right of Bernie is SLAPP" No. It's just for whatever reason, the right wing is [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, as quickly as it went away, Article 13 was back in the EU. And now somehow the Copyright Directive was even worse than before, but still not bad enough for the copyright industries. Meanwhile, we wrote about the failings of YouTube's ContentID, the ongoing fight to make PACER [...]

Here we go again. In so many of these trademark disputes, the disputer far too often is wielding overly broad trademarks granted by the USPTO to suggest that having that registered mark is all they need to shut down the use of those broad terms by others. Nowhere do you find any claims of actual [...]

Dropshipping - memorably described by Sirin Kale in Wired as people selling products they've never handled, from countries they've never visited, to consumers they've never met" - is one of the best examples of pure" Internet activity around. As Kale explains: Dropshipping is a fulfilment" method. At one end of the supply chain, an entrepreneur [...]

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who is still indicted and facing a trial later this year) has argued in court that governments both should never, ever try to influence what content social media sites take down, but also that Texas should be able to tell social media websites what content they must keep up and [...]

At the end of last month, a federal court judge decided to throw the First Amendment out the window to engage in a bit of the old prior restraint. At the center of this case (but not the case actually before the judge) was The Oregonian, a newspaper that found itself in possession of documents [...]

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The free speech absolutist" is at it again. Despite his claim to be an absolutist, Elon Musk has an uncanny ability to magically keep finding himself involved in lawsuits that are attempts to suppress the free speech rights of others. And he's at it again. Earlier this week, actor Gina Carano sued Disney almost exactly [...]

Back in 2019, when fifth generation (5G) wireless was getting a lot of dumb (and as it turned out, unwarranted) marketing hype, the cable industry came up with an amazing idea: they'd simply call their existing cable broadband service a 10G technology" in a bid to (1) piggyback on the hype 5G was getting, and [...]

Maintaining some sort of database of known criminals and their criminal associates is undoubtedly a smart thing to do. Cross-referencing detainees makes sense, especially when it comes to larger criminal organizations. Ensuring databases are up to date, both in terms of adding new associates as well as removing people who aren't connected to criminal activity, [...]

I don't know what it is or why it is, but the Xbox team just can't seem to communicate clearly when it comes to how it's going to handle exclusivity in games for its console. After it gobbled up several game studios and publishers, most recently Activision Blizzard, the messaging from the Xbox team about [...]

For decades, frustrated towns and cities all over the country have responded to telecom market failure by building their own fiber broadband networks. Data routinely shows that not only do these networks providefaster, better, and cheaper service, the networks are generally more accountable to the public - because they're directly owned and staffed by locals [...]

Earlier this week I posted two examples of people falsely being told that a post or a search was deemed connected to child sexual abuse material. Earlier this week, I thought I had spotted another example, when someone on Bluesky alerted me that they had searched for techdirt" and the results included a line saying [...]

This would be the second time in recent months that a cop tech purveyor with a heavily checkered past has shelled out big bucks to expand the reach of its own tech, as well as expand the reach of existing police surveillance capabilities. Last October, ShotSpotter - the company whose shoddy shot spotting has been [...]

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Over the last few days there have been a few stories making the rounds on right wing media sites, claiming that Rep. Jim Jordan had exposed the White House pressuring Amazon to remove books related to COVID disinformation. This is based on a thread Jordan posted to ExTwitter. If it's true that the White House [...]

So we've noted more than once that as the streaming sector is saturated and new user growth slows, streaming giants will follow on a fairly predictable path that got their predecessors (cable TV companies) in trouble. Namely, shifting away from innovation and disruption and consumer welfare, and toward nickel-and-diming customers in a bid to give [...]

It's not often when three of your biggest interests all intersect at once, but here we are. Readers here will know that I am a regular when it comes to writing about trademark disputes, bullying, and news. You may also know that I have quite the affinity for wine. You probably don't know, however, that [...]

In late 2022, the state of New Yorkfinally passednew right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live last month, 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 only obtain [...]

Every week it's some other dumb thing going on in the Senate. On Tuesday Senator Josh Hawley went to the (mostly empty) Senate floor to seek unanimous consent" for the STOP CSAM bill. That's basically a process to rush the bill forward before it's ready. We've written about STOP CSAM before. Despite it's name, it [...]