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There's been this weird idea lately, even among people who used to recognize that copyright only empowers the largest gatekeepers, that in the AI world we have to magically flip the script on copyright and use it as a tool to get AI companies to pay for the material they train on. But, as we've [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app maker over-collecting your detailed personal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information to any nitwit with a nickel. And despite the added risks this creates in the post-Roe era, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous response to the claim that Elon Musk fights censorship: Remember when Elon happily complied with the Turkish government's request to censor anti-Erdogan content during its presidential election? In second place, it's a double-winning comment from Thad that also takes first place [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, consumer groups accused the FCC of weakening oversight of cell carriers under the pretense of battling text message spam, activists were making one last push to restore net neutrality via the Congressional Review Act, and senators were continuing to point out that US broadband maps suck. The FBI [...]

Law enforcement for profit is an ugly proposition. Most of us immediately think of civil asset forfeiture, which is generally just cops going shopping for stuff they want or cash to buy the stuff they want that isn't subject to outside oversight. But there's another undercurrent of corruption that runs through small town America - [...]

Hormel, the foodstuffs company that makes Spam, amongst other items, has made it onto our pages before. And not for good reasons. Ages ago, the company attempted to sue anti-spam proprietors, arguing that its Spam" trademark somehow translated into the world of IT and email. Separately, the company also bullied a Canadian brewery into changing [...]

We've long known the Fifth Circuit is the worst circuit to hear your case involving rights violations by law enforcement. Despite one particularly blistering dissent from Judge Don Willett calling qualified immunity a rigged game" litigants almost always lose, the Fifth Circuit continues to coddle cops and overreaching government officials to give them what they [...]

This wasn't hard to predict. When Montana passed its TikTok ban in April we called it laughably unconstitutional." Montana's very silly Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, who claimed to have been the driving force behind the bill, had insisted that the state would be vindicated in court. As we noted when the bill passed, his public [...]

Most people seem to understand the First Amendment protects their right to say stupid or offensive things, especially when they're the ones saying them. These same people often forget the First Amendment does not protect them from counter-speech, during which they may be publicly decried as stupid or offensive. The same goes for most government [...]

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Okay, okay, I think this is the last of my posts about Elon Musk's unhinged appearance at the DealBook Summit with ill-prepared interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. We already covered his cursing out advertisers, while predicting that earth will judge" them, as well as his statement that AI copyright lawsuits don't matter because Digital God" will [...]

For decades, cable TV giants have nickel-and-dimed customers with a rotating assortment of bullshit cable TV fees, whether it's regulatory recovery" fee (a misleadingly named fee designed to have you blaming government for industry greed), regional sports fees (charged whether or not you watch sports), or the completely meaningless broadcast TV fee" (which has ballooned [...]

One of the more famous, and my favorite, quotations attributed to Winston Churchill is: Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." My second favorite Churchill quote, by the way, is: Dammit, I can't decide between these three fingers of whiskey and this tankard of champagne!" Anyway, the point [...]

One of things we enjoy here at Techdirt is when even those with legitimate gripes about trademark law take a bemused view about the whole thing, rather than immediately jumping to angry and overly aggressive threats. No one likes a trademark bully, even when the trademark holder might have a legitimate claim. A few weeks [...]

A few months ago a California court of appeals issued a really terrible decision in Liapes v. Facebook. Liapes, a Facebook user, was unhappy that the ads delivered to her correlated with some of her characteristics, like her age. As a result there were certain ads, like one provided by an insurer offering a particular [...]

The Stored Communications Act - enacted in 1986 - is not only outdated, it's also pretty weird. An amendment to the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), the SCA added and subtracted privacy from communications. It's the subtractions that are bothersome. Law enforcement wasn't too happy a lot of electronic communications were now subject to warrant [...]

So, we already wrote about the biggest headline grabbing moment from Elon Musk's Dealbook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin yesterday, but there was another crazy, Techdirt-relevant one involving copyright and AI. As we've explained over and over again, copyright is the wrong tool to use to regulate AI, and using it will lead to bad [...]

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I'm not sure Elon quite understands the concept of damage control." Advertisers are bailing, and the rate increases every time he says something stupid or endorses this or that conspiracy theory. It's costing the company tons of money, but he still can't admit that he's the problem. So, instead, he's blaming everyone else. And sometimes [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside an historic $42.5 billion for broadband deployment. It also tasked the FCC with creating rules aimed at ending decades of race and class based-discrimination in broadband deployment, which have been well documented by The Markup, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), and others. The goal was to try and [...]

Unity has had a tough time of it recently. After the company decided to put in place a major pricing scheme shift for users of its game engine back in September, the company has since experienced all kinds of fallout over the changes, ousted its CEO, and has generally been vilified for not bothering to [...]

There are few things I enjoy more than watching cocksure cops trip over their own hubris. And it happens so often. Cops believe that since they are (affirmatively) law enforcement officers and the people they target are (only allegedly) criminals, they are firmly in the right, no matter what they do or what rights they [...]

Copyright policy is a sticky tricky thing, and there are battles that have been fought for decades among public and corporate interests. Typically, it's the corporate interests that win - especially the content industry. We've seen power, and copyrights, collect among a small group of content companies because of this. But there is one significant [...]

I mean, it's not like we didn't warn Elon Musk. Free speech is not about creating a single private space where everyone gets to speak, because that doesn't support free speech. It enables the worst of society to browbeat, harass, and abuse anyone they dislike, creating a total garbage dump that drives people away and [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

For decades, the government has used the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of phone records without a warrant. Even prior to the creation of the Third Party Doctrine by the Supreme Court in 1979, government agencies were obtaining phone records using pen register requests that provided them with info on numbers called and [...]

The rushed integration of half-baked AI" (aka not at all sentient language learning models) into journalism has been a gargantuan mess. Execs at companies like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) have made it very clear they see LLMs primarily as a way to attack labor and cut corners, resulting in soulless and low [...]

The problem with putting cops in schools isn't necessarily that there are never things that happen in schools that require a law enforcement response. (Unfortunately, a lot of those things are school shootings, which cops aren't all that capable of responding to.) The problem is that school administrators tend to think that because they have [...]

Back in 2015, Techdirt wrote about one of China's many attempts to control the online world, in this case by requiring everyone to use real names when they register for online services. As that post noted, the fact that the Chinese authorities had announced similar initiatives several times since 2003 suggests that implementing the policy [...]

The world of generative AI has been changing rapidly, and that's not something that's going to stop any time soon. Today, we're joined on the podcast by Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (no, not Elon Musk's new bot called Grok) - a company working on a new technology stack that drastically speeds up [...]

We keep pointing out just how incredible it is that Elon Musk is personally responsible for the destruction of so much of ExTwitter's business model. Even if you believe that the company was too bloated, or that it's business model needed to change, as you look at how the company is flailing, it can be [...]

New York City residents will, once again, be asked to foot the bill for NYPD efforts that solely benefit the nation's largest police department. It's not enough that they've been asked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to bail out officers hit with civil rights lawsuits. It's not enough that they've been [...]

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A month ago we wrote about Google effectively pulling up the ladder" on the open internet by embracing age verification mandates as part of a regulatory approach to child safety. As we pointed out at the time, this is bizarre and stupid for a variety of reasons, but also not too surprising. It's bizarre because [...]

For decades, the FCC has maintained an arguably pathetic definition of broadband," allowing the telecom industry to under-deliver substandard access. And despite some new rhetoric from the agency under Biden, that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. Broadband was originally defined as any 200 kbps connection. In 2010, that pathetic definition was changed to [...]

I don't know what it is about US law enforcement culture, but it far too often seems to be that officers deployed to help people choose to hurt people instead. When people are suffering mental distress, cops become first responders. Unlike other first responders, like EMTs or firefighters, the desire to harm tends to surpass [...]

With almost zero public notice, the Board of Supervisors of Marin County, California (just to the north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge) is on the verge of approving tomorrow a demand by the county sheriff's department to install license plate cameras throughout the county. As a county resident, I object. My comment [...]

We've noted how the GOP's obsession with TikTok is... weird and superficial. Guys like Ted Cruz or Brendan Carr will suffer absolute embolisms about TikTok (and TikTok only) to get on cable news where they'll be portrayed as good faith privacy reformers. While simultaneously refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers [...]

Facial recognition tech has slowly gone mainstream over the past half-decade. Not just in acceptance, but also in opposition. Kashmir Hill exposed perhaps the worst purveyor of this tech - Clearview - with a series of articles exposing the company's tactics as well as its far right backers. Clearview has managed to become a pariah [...]

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We've already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter's lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks [...]

Two years ago the state of California unveiled amajor broadband planthat, among other things, aims to spend $3.5 billion to create a massive, open access middle mile" fiber network in a bid to boost competition. It's part of a broader quest to make broadband bothmore affordable and more competitive(see ourCopia report from last yeardiscussing the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about Elon Musk's extremely terrible lawsuit against Media Matters: Of course, as you know firsthand, a suit doesn't have to have any merit to make life miserable for its targets. In second place, it's Mechanical Rhizome with a comment [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the government agreed to delete data copied from a traveler's phone after being hit with a motion for return of property" while, in something of an inverse situation, prosecutors charged a suspect with evidence tampering after a seized iPhone was remotely wiped. Cord-cutting was setting more records while [...]

Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it's not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally. From publishers taking down YouTubers because of an oopsie to Viacom DMCAing [...]

For years we've talked about the growing threat of SIM hijacking, which involves a criminal covertly porting out your phone number from right underneath your nose (quite often with the help of bribed or connedwireless carrier employees). Once they have your phone identity, they have access to most of your personal accounts secured by two-factor [...]

It's somewhat incredible when you look at the full story, but once again, the DOJ has failed in its attempt to claim that Backpage founder/editor Michael Lacey was facilitating sex trafficking with the site. They did convict him on one count of money laundering, for transferring $16.5 million to a bank in Hungary right around [...]

In Italy, an age-verification coalition against porn is getting traction. On September 4th, the Minister of Family Eugenia Roccella, representing the right-wing majority,initiatedconsultations for introducing a law to prevent minors from accessing pornographic content. On November 13th, the Democratic Party (currently the main opposition party)presentedthe Digital Innovation Act, whoseArticle 17aims to prevent minors from accessing [...]

There are few moves that make reporting more credible than suing the reporter for defamation and losing. It not only revives the negative reporting that might have faded into the white noise of constant internet churn, but also exposes the plaintiff as someone unable to handle being the subject of factual reporting. The Streisand Effect, [...]

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