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We have pointed out just how ridiculous Elon Musk's SLAPP lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate is, so much that I supported the filing of an amicus brief in support of CCDH, even as I find CCDH's positions and research to be generally problematic and misleading. But, even if their research methods aren't [...]

There are a variety of reasons to alter, if not actually end, the Section 702 collection. Whatever value it may have in terms of national security, the very real fact is that it has been endlessly abused by the FBI since its inception. It's a foreign-facing collection, which means it harvests communications and data involving [...]

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At the Supreme Court's oral arguments about Florida and Texas' social media content moderation laws, there was a fair bit of talk about Section 230. As we noted at the time, a few of the Justices (namely Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) seemed confused about Section 230 and also about what role (if any) it [...]

So we've noted for a long while that the fixation on China and TikTok specifically has often been used by some lazy thinkers (like the FCC's Brendan Carr) as a giant distraction from the fact the U.S. has proven too corrupt to regulate data brokers, or even to pass a baseline privacy law for the [...]

Full disclosure as a matter of throat-clearing: I generally like BrewDog, a brewery based in the UK. Between really enjoying their beer in the past and the fact that the company underwent a concerted effort to change its previously draconian stance on IP issues, the company has just generally rubbed me the right way, so [...]

Very rarely do you see anyone prevail in court when any form of forfeiture is in play. The forfeiture litigation deck is firmly stacked in favor of the government, which rarely needs anything approaching actual proof to walk off with someone's property. It's even more rare to see someone awarded damages in a civil lawsuit [...]

Much like the phrase smart technology," the word security" just doesn't mean what it used to. Case in point: last September, owners of Wyze smart home security cameras" were informed at the company's forums that the company had crossed some wires in the backend," resulting in a glitch that allowed 2,300 users to see the [...]

Politics is messy, and you get the feeling that a lot of internet companies want nothing to do with politics" of any kind. Back in 2019 Twitter (when it was still Twitter) decided to ban all political ads, a near-impossible task guaranteed to make a mess of things (such as banning get out the vote" [...]

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At the start of this year, for the sixth time in a row, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Once again, we got a whole bunch of fantastic entries making use of newly public domain materials to create games of all types. And now it's time [...]

I know people are bored to death after years of infighting over net neutrality. But the FCC's attempts to impose something vaguely resembling oversight upon a bunch of shitty regional telecom monopolies that have bludgeoned U.S. broadband into uncompetitive rubble still matters, no matter how tired the press and public might be of the debate, [...]

The mess is getting a little messier. We had talked days ago about Sony's decision to shutter its Funimation platform in favor of a more recent acquisition in Crunchyroll. Anyone with a Funimation account would be transitioned into a Crunchyroll account, which sounds all good until you realize that Funimation users had plenty of digital [...]

No matter how minor the infraction, it still deserves the court's full attention. That's the ultimate lesson of this New York court decision, brought to us by FourthAmendment.com. It starts with an alleged window tint violation (always a favorite of cops on fishing expedition), morphs into a fire hydrant parking violation, and finally ends with [...]

With the UK moving forward with its plans for an online porn license" for anyone to view adult content online, and with various state legislatures pushing to effectively require the same in the US, this dumb and counterproductive idea is proving quite popular among the political class. Thankfully, not in Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin [...]

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub and some of the most popular adult film studios and premium porn websites. Based in Montreal, Quebec, Aylo (formerly MindGeek) maintains a global media empire of adult sites. Paxton makes clear in a press release that the lawsuit aims to enforce a [...]

As Mike already noted, the weirdest moment of the nearly four-hour, double-case hearing at the Supreme Court on Monday in the NetChoice and CCIA legal challenges of Florida's and Texas's social media laws came maybe two thirds into the oral argument, when Justice Alito openly wondered, If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it [...]

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Soon after Elon took over Twitter and brought with him a sink-shaped wrecking ball, we wrote a story wondering if there was anyone left at the company who remembered that the company had a consent decree with the FTC that required it to take certain steps to make sure private info was not revealed to [...]

Last month you probably sawthe storyabout how somebody used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn't particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact. But it clearly [...]

For quite some time now we've been pointing out the many harms of age verification technologies, and how they're a disaster for privacy. In particular, we've noted that if you have someone collecting biometric information on people, that data itself becomes a massive risk since it will be targeted. And, remember, a year and a [...]

Like most tech, facial recognition AI continues to become cheaper and easier to implement. Is it getting better? Well, that hardly seems to be a primary concern for those deploying it. Adoption of this tech tends to focus on the law enforcement side of things. This is where it seems to perform worse. The tech [...]

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments over both Florida and Texas' social media content moderation laws. Even though the issues were similar, and the parties challenging both laws (NetChoice and CCIA) were the same (and had the same lawyer, Paul Clement, argue both cases), the laws are somewhat different, and so each [...]

Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly named Piracy Shield". This is Italy's new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the copyright industry a disproportionate power to control what is available online, no court orders required. Piracy Shield wentlive in December, and has just issued itsfirst blocking [...]

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Earlier this year, we wrote about outspoken financier Bill Ackman's threat to sue Business Insider over articles regarding accusations by the publication that Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, had plagiarized parts of her dissertation years ago. The timeline and context of what happened here is important because Ackman continues to ignore it. Ackman got upset about [...]

As we survey the rubble that once was the U.S. journalism industry, a common refrain involves lamenting that online journalism just isn't profitable." But as the recent collapse of outlets like Sports Illustrated and The Messenger illustrate, the real culprit often isn't that journalism isn't profitable, it's that U.S. media is predominantly run by utterly [...]

Copyright is generally understood to be for the benefit of two groups of people: creators and their audience. Given that modern copyright often acts against the interests of the general public - forbidding even the most innocuous sharing of copyright material online - copyright intermediaries such as publishers, recording companies and film studios typically place [...]

For semi-obvious reasons, I've been following developments at Bluesky closely, given that my Protocols, not Platforms paper was originally part of the reason Jack Dorsey decided to create Bluesky. I have no official association with the organization, though I did help Twitter review some of the early Bluesky proposals and spoke with a few of [...]

Law enforcement says laws are the rules that apply to everyone, but especially to people who aren't in the law enforcement business. We have to follow the laws or face the consequences. But it often appears cops hold themselves to a lower standard. They only have to follow the laws that won't get in the [...]

This morning, as you likely heard, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the NetChoice/CCIA cases regarding Texas' and Florida's social media laws. The outcomes of these cases will have a pretty major impact on the future of online speech. While a lot of people have suggested that the states' arguments are supported by conservatives, [...]

We'venoted for decadeshow, despite all the political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide," the U.S.doesn't truly know where broadband is or isn't available. The FCC's past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and excluding a key metric of [...]

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There have been plenty of silly lawsuits against tech companies over the last few years, but a new one from Nevada against Meta may be the most crazy - and most dangerous - that we've seen so far. While heavily redacted, the basics fit the pattern of all of these lawsuits. Vague claims of harms [...]

Sometimes, an advertisement is worth a thousand op-eds. Last week, one of us co-authored an op-ed criticizing an amicus brief filed by the American Economic Liberties Project and several prominent law professors in the pending Supreme Court case NetChoice v. Paxton. AELP's brief defends the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from [...]

This week, we've got a double winner on the insightful side with Toom1275 taking both top spots. In first place, it's a comment about the news that Sony has once again made purchased digital content disappear: If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing. In second place, it's a general-purpose comment about Elon Musk: There [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the EU Commission decided to mock the public by insisting all the fears about the copyright directive were myths, even as lots of real people were showing up in real life to protest, and journalists were pointing out the problems with Article 11. Amidst this, we featured a [...]

The cop-friendliest circuit in the United States has done it again. Whenever there's a bit of doubt to be had, it's the cops benefiting from it when the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court handles the case. Sure, every so often a judge or two might serve up a blistering dissent. And, even more rarely, a Fifth [...]

Who knew you could make this much fuss over a +" sign? Back in 2021, Peloton was sued by a company called World Champ Tech LLC over the former's Peloton Bike+ name. See, World Champ has a trademark for its biking mobile app called Bike+" and sued claiming that Peloton's product constituted trademark infringement. World [...]

If you work for a living, do you feel coerced into doing your job? According to Senator Mike Lee, if you have anything to do with pornography, and need to earn money in the industry, it must be coercion at play. While the world continues to be fooled by the Kids Online Safety Act's false [...]

Look, we all like to point out that when dealing in content moderation, mistakes are inevitable. But, I always find it amusing when people insist that mistakes must have been for nefarious purposes. Over the last few years, people, including ExTwitter owner Elon Musk, have insisted that stories like Twitter's decision to restrict the sharing [...]

The EU's right to be forgotten" was always a mess in theory. In practice, it's even worse. This extension of EU data privacy laws gives people the power to delist and/or remove content published by others about themselves. Anyone could immediately see how this would be abused. People wishing to remove unflattering content would send [...]

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Sometimes my I have not participated in any conspiracy to or complicity in murder" t-shirt raises a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Remember Rajat Khare? He's the guy associated with Appin Technologies in India, and there's a pattern of stories mentioning his name suddenly disappearing (or his name disappearing from them) after [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it [...]

There's a post on the Creative Commons blog with someimportant news about copyright(in the UK, at least): In November 2023, the Court of Appeal inTHJ v Sheridanoffered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK. In setting the copyright originality [...]

Of all the ways in which Congress chooses to spend its time and focus its priorities, legislation introducing a solution in search of a problem is surely one of the most frustrating. With that in mind, two United States Congress critters have introduced House Resolution 7228, which aims chiefly to confer concrete copyright protection to [...]

We've been talking a lot about how as streaming subscription growth slows, streaming companies will begin doing whatever's necessary to deliver Wall Street quarterly growth at any cost. Even if it cannibalizes longer term company health, customer satisfaction, and brand quality. Just like the cable giants they disrupted, that generally means lots of prices hikes, [...]

Every time we think it can't possibly get dumber, it does. Last month, we wrote about the absolute nonsense in which New York City mayor Eric Adams declared social media a public health hazard, akin to toxic waste. As we noted at the time, this was in the midst of a variety of scandals of [...]

The DMCA process remains as easily abused as ever, even as companies like Google (and, especially, Automattic) do what they can to head off this abuse. It's a numbers game. When you're the size of Google, it's impossible to vet every takedown demand. The easiest thing to do is comply immediately and, if need be, [...]