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Readers here shouldn't need to be reminded that the Tolkien Estate, through its company Middle-Earth Enterprises, is known to be extremely aggressive with its enforcement of intellectual property over anything remotely to do with The Lord of the Rings. The estate appears to operate under the notion that it has control over words via trademark [...]

Last year we were dismayed (and somewhat annoyed) to see the FTC step way beyond its bounds and expertise by issuing a ridiculous comment to the US Copyright Office regarding questions around AI and copyright. In it, the FTC (which has no authority - or expertise - regarding copyright law) argued that fair use was [...]

2023 is over. Taylor Swift was Time's Person of the Year, beating out candidates like Jerome Powell, who may have stuck the economic soft-landing, but can't hit the high notes. Only a fool would challenge the decision, but I would like to nominate 2023's Unperson of the year - ChatGPT; the neural-network based, Large Language [...]

Facial recognition tech works best on white, male faces. White males have historically been the immediate beneficiaries of public policy, as well as those put in place by private companies. I say historically," but this advantageous situation has mostly proven incapable of being disrupted by tech advances. Facial recognition tech has taken an existing problem [...]

Back in September we praised Elon Musk for deciding to challenge California's new social media transparency law, AB 587. As we had discussed while the bill was being debated, while it's framed as a transparency bill, it has all sorts of problems. It would (1) enable the California government officials (including local officials) to effectively [...]

For years, the cable industry has dreamed of a future where they could use your cable box to actively track your every behavior using cameras and microphones and then monetize the data. At one point way back in 2009, Comcast made it clear they were even interested in using embedded microphones and cameras to monitor [...]

Join our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Happy new year, everyone - and happy public domain day! That's right: today's the day that works from 1928 exit copyright protection and become public domain in the US, and that means it's time for the latest edition of our annual public domain game [...]

Happy (almost) new year, Techdirt readers! As always, it's time to take take a break from the regular weekly post and take a look at the comments that got the most votes from our community this year in the insightful and funny categories, plus a special look at the comments that got the most combined [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a dangerous court ruling said colleges may be required to block access to certain websites, while we wrote about how ridiculous it is to make domain registrars liable for content on domains. Rep. Louie Gohmert was pushing to strip Section 230 immunity from social media platforms that aren't [...]

Every year since 2008, my final post of the year for Techdirt is about optimism. This makes this year's post (which will be the only post for today - go out and enjoy the holiday times, people) my 15th such post. As I said, this process began back in 2008 when I had a few [...]

A year ago, Inotedthat many of Walled Culture's illustrations were being produced usinggenerative AI. During that time, AI has developed rapidly. For example, in the field of images, OpenAI has introducedDALL-E 3 in ChatGPT: When prompted with an idea, ChatGPT will automatically generate tailored, detailed prompts for DALLE 3 that bring your idea to life. [...]

The Fourth Amendment is rarely a match for the Third Party Doctrine. In recent years, things have gotten a wee bit better thanks to a couple of Supreme Court rulings. But the operative principle still overrides: whatever we share (voluntarily or not) with private companies can often be obtained without a warrant. That's why bills [...]

If you follow tech news at all, you likely heard some stuff about the potential for an Apple Watch ban over patent infringement. It was all over the news. Apple had pulled its high end watches from its store last week, following an ITC ruling from earlier this year claiming that Apple's blood oxygen reading [...]

Jeffrey Dastin, writing for Reuters, has dug up some very interesting information about TASER, which has since re-branded to Axon (and has since set its sights on arming cops with body cams, in addition to its infamous electrical devices). The story behind the founding of TASER is something its founder, Rick Smith, loves to expound [...]

This week the NY Times somehow broke the story of... well, the NY Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft. I wonder who tipped them off. Anyhoo, the lawsuit in many ways is similar to some of the over a dozen lawsuits filed by copyright holders against AI companies. We've written about how silly many of these [...]

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from enshittification," that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see:Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street's utterly [...]

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) published a report on body cam use by law enforcement agencies in 2014. It not only presented stats on body cam use around the nation, but also attempted to create a set of best practices for the agencies utilizing them. Since then, body cams have become as commonplace as [...]

Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems ofopen access. Animportant editorialin the journalWeb Ecologyraises an issue for open access that I've not seen mentioned before. It concerns the fraught issue of rebuttal articles, which offer fact-based criticism of already-published academic papers: Critical comments on published articles vary in importance; they can [...]

Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim ownership" of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true ofsoftware patents, an area EFF has been speaking out about for more than 20 years now. [...]

When law enforcement officers screw up, it's always someone else's fault. It's the lack of trust or support for police officers, something that has steadily declined in the last half-decade. It's a lack of funding, even though law enforcement agencies have rarely seen their budgets cut. It's people emboldened by accountability efforts. It's the hundreds [...]

Last year, we wrote a bunch about how the Utah legislature was rushing through a bill to destroy the internet by claiming they were doing it for the children." There were all sorts of obvious problems with the bill, and even though it was clearly unconstitutional, Utah Governor Spencer Cox not only signed it, but [...]

One reason that right to repair" reform has such broad, bipartisan public support is because there's really no aspect of your daily life that isn't touched by it. The effort to monopolize repair isn't just the territory of Apple or game console makers like Sony and Microsoft. The problem is present in everything from the [...]

When we're young, impressionable, and financially incapable of donating significant amounts of money to super PACs, we're taught that the American government is a system of checks and balances. Civics classes explain there are three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial - all of which are supposed to be independent and equally powerful. The [...]

Copyright strikes on hosted video content happens all the time. There are tons of strikes issued in error, plenty that are purely fraud and abuse, and a bunch that may have been done in good faith but completely fail to recognize if and when specific content would be protected by fair use. What doesn't happen [...]

Aylo Holdings, the parent company of Pornhub and some of the largest free and premium porn sites in the world, agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to help resolve a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into the platform's conduct related to a sex trafficking scheme. According to documents provided by the Department of Justice [...]

A recent Guardian interview with theBritish Library's head of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, reveals the problems caused by copyright for those tasked with preserving modern culture. In some respects, the British Library finds itself in a fortunate position, as Rossi explains: Because we collect under non-print legal deposit [the regulation that grants the British [...]

With the 13-in-1 Docking Station, you can use all of your devices while they stay connected and charged. It includes 2 HDMI, 1 VGA, 3 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, 1 USB-C data, 1 USB-C charging, 1 SD card, 1 TF card, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 3.5mm Aux port. All of these features make [...]

Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the Republican obsession with TikTok is a hollow performance. This is a party that refuses to pass a useful privacy law (or to regulate data brokers). This is a party that generally couldn't care less about widespread corruption, or its impact on national security. Yet over the last three years, the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a comment mischaracterizing a lot of what happened in the last several years: Why do you lie so transparently. It's fucking pathetic. The Muller Special Counsel indicted 34 people: 26 Russian nationals(some, known members of the GRU), 3 Russian [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a bunch of entertainment industry lobbyists were given a chance to pay $5000 to attend the Grammys with two congressmen, an appeals court handed another loss to MP3 reseller ReDigi, and copyright lobbyists were failing to keep their story straight on the EU Copyright Directive (the problems of [...]

We've posted about Swedish oat milk maker Oatly several times here at Techdirt and never for good reasons. The company has a reputation as a trademark bully and abuser, starting with its failed attempt to lock out rival companies from using the word oat", even though that is a product descriptor, as well as its [...]

Qualified immunity rulings are an unqualified mess. The question doesn't revolve around whether or not rights were violated. In most cases, they were. Instead, the question revolves around whether or not the rights violation was clearly established." The Supreme Court created this doctrine decades ago. And ever since then, it has been making it more [...]

Half a decade ago we documented how the U.S. wireless industry was caught over-collecting sensitive user location and vast troves of behavioral data, then selling access to that data to pretty much anybody with a couple of nickels to rub together. It resulted in no limit of abuse from everybody from stalkers to law enforcement [...]

In 2023, the extreme ideology of human extinction from AI" became one of the most prominent trends. It was followed by extreme regulation proposals. As we enter 2024, let's take a moment to reflect: How did we get here? 2022: Public release of LLMs The first big news story on LLMs (Large Language Models) can [...]

Back in April we noted that the EU had designated 17 sites as VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms), the ROUSs" (Rodents of Unusual Size) of the internet. Some of those sites are still contesting the designation, but in the meantime, the EU Commission has dug deep into its porn viewing habits and designated three more [...]

In the rapidly evolving world of digital learning, having access to the right resources can make all the difference. Enter Headway, the revolutionary app designed to help you turn personal growth into a habit. With a lifetime subscription, you get unlimited access to a huge number of non-fiction bestsellers, summarized into 15-minute reads. Be it [...]

Governments know the difference between right and wrong. It's just that they often don't seem to care. This is a small-ish wrong, but it's a wrong nonetheless. Like far too many other state bodies charged with policing vanity plate messages, the South Dakota Motor Vehicle Division has a problem giving its tacit blessing to other [...]

By now we've well established that this particularseries of media mergers- which began with AT&T's doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner's subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery - were some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by man. The idiotic saga burned through hundreds of billions in [...]

The saga of former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton has come to a close. We began talking about Nikola, a company that bill itself as decarbonizing" the trucking industry by selling electric long-haul trucks, back in 2020 when it was revealed that a very slick demo of its products had been totally staged. Like, hilariously staged. [...]

Last week in the Error 402 series on the past, present, and future of web monetization, we talked about the whole information wants to be expensive, information wants to be free" dilemma, that partially explained why early paywalls failed, and why display and search ads seemed to be the primary way in which internet content [...]

Copyright has always been about money. That's why the copyright industry fights so hard to strengthen legal protections, in order to boost its profits. However, getting detailed information about how much money is involved, and who receives it, is hard, because there are so many small pieces to the overall copyright ecosystem. That makes a [...]

People keep accusing me of criticizing Elon Musk because I hate" him. But I don't hate him, nor do I criticize him out of any personal feelings at all, beyond thinking that he often is hypocritical in his decision making, and makes decisions that defy common sense and logic. But when he does the right [...]

Earlier this month the Biden FCC announced that it was exploring banning early termination fees, which ISPs use to punish you for switching to competitors. It was a long overdue action in a country where cable and broadband giants routinely rip off consumers with a rotating bevy of fees, all designed to let them falsely [...]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular enterprise cloud computing solutions, used by businesses around the world to manage data, promote effective communication, secure proprietary information, and more. The Amazon Web Services Training course aims to make you completely proficient in navigating the Management Console. It's on sale for $40. Note: The [...]

There have been all sorts of overblown fears and moral panics raised by the availability of new generative AI tools. And one that I keep hearing about, which many people have accepted as obviously true, is that it will damage school education, as kids will just use ChatGPT to do their work. This has always [...]

Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report showing that not only has Tesla aggressively lied about its EV ranges for the better part of the last decade, it created teams whose entire purpose was to lie to customers about it when they called up to complain. The story lasted all of two days in [...]

Earlier this year we discussed a trademark fight between rapper Eminem and two stars of The Real Houswives of Potomac, Gizelle Bryant and Robyn Dixon. At issue was the trademark application for Bryant and Dixon's podcast, which is entitled Reasonably Shady." Em's legal team opposed that application, arguing essentially that all things shady" belong to [...]

As you likely know, a few weeks back former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor passed away. There have been lots of discussions about her rulings and her legacy, but the one that caught my eye was from the Disruptive Competition Project, which has a post by Jonathan Band exploring her immense impact on copyright [...]

The attacks ongenerative AIstarted out claiming that it was all about protecting the creators whose works were being stolen" in some mysterious way by virtue of software analyzing them. In some cases, that high-minded stance has alreadydegeneratedinto yet another scheme to pay collecting societies even more for doing next to nothing. But beyond all this [...]