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Neither the FCC nor FTC has a particularly good track record of standing up to broadband and cable giants when it comes to their longstanding track record of anticompetitive behavior, price gouging, or nickel-and-diming their often captive customers with bogus, hidden fees. Though occasionally one of the two agencies does step in to try make [...]

When it comes to copyright suits or conflicts that never should have existed, one of the most common misunderstandings that births them is not understanding the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law. Even to most laypeople, once you explain it, it's quite simple. You can copyright a specific expression of something, such as literature, recorded music, [...]

In our continuing Error 402 series on the monetization of web content, we've been talking a lot about things that haven't worked and a few things that have (kinda?) worked, but not in a particularly appealing way (ads, mainly). We will eventually get to more examples of things that are working - along with some [...]

We've got a nice fresh live recording for you today! Just yesterday, Mike was at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED Conference to participate in a panel discussion with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, moderated by former Twitter Trust & Safety head Yoel Roth. The subject was decentralized and federated social media, especially its implications for content moderation, [...]

It seems that if anything has gone wrong in the world, ignorant and foolish politicians have a readymade scapegoat: it's all social media's fault. NYC Mayor Eric Adams is facing a pretty big list of crises, some of his own making. He's facing what appears to be a pretty serious corruption investigation. He's cutting a [...]

Pretty much every law enforcement agency gets exactly what it wants during budget discussions. The spending on policing always seems to increase, despite years of diminishing returns. The money flows in, but very little flows back out in terms of community relations, accountability, or transparency. In recent years, there have been discussions about defunding" law [...]

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Well, here's a weird one. I was going through the various amicus briefs filed in support of the governments of Texas and Florida's ability to tell websites that they must host speech that violates their rules, and, damn, there are some ridiculous ones (more posts coming on that front soon...). However, one of them - [...]

You might recall that back during the net neutrality wars Netflix was a notable supporter of the concept, arguing that big ISPs shouldn't be able to pick and choose winners and losers on their networks, or use their monopoly over broadband access to undermine competition over their networks. Then, you might recall that as Netflix [...]

The saga of PC title The Day Before is finally over. Like, completely over. Whatever this game was, and that is still very much an open question at a 10,000 foot level, it's now gone. And I can't say that I know for sure that the speed with which this game went from being launched [...]

When we last checked in with what's left of Sports Illustrated, its owner, The Arena Group, had just got done baring its ass as part of a giant AI' related scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to create a bunch of fake, AI-generated writers to shit out lazy, uninteresting clickbait, [...]

On February, 19, 2021, the government - taking the form of Nevada State Troopers (and an assist via phone by the DEA) - stole former Marine Stephen Lara's life savings. Lara was traveling from Texas to California in a rental vehicle to visit his daughters. He had $86,900 in his car with him, along with [...]

Going back nearly 15 years, we had a story raising the question of whether or not legal filings were (or should be?) covered by copyright. As we noted at the time, it seems pretty clear that, under today's somewhat absurd copyright, it is entirely possible that such filings are technically covered, though they really shouldn't [...]

Texas is in a close race with Florida for the title of Most Unconstitutional Laws Enacted." Florida's legislators will probably end up taking this title because they seem crazier/more productive than their counterparts in Texas. But let's not encourage those Texas underachievers! These are bad laws written by worse people. They're almost universally incapable of [...]

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One of the dumber things we've seen over the last couple of years is the supposed war on woke" and (more recently) attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion" efforts (often shortened to the acronym DEI). In almost every case, these attacks misrepresent reality to generate culture war bullshit, and make a bunch of false claims [...]

It's equal parts annoying and bizarre that we've normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, partisan operatives, and marketers have made the U.S.' primary voice communication platform largely unusable. Americans received 3.8 billion robocalls last month, and despite some modest inroads in fighting the problem, it continues to grow for reasons we've already well [...]

There can't really be much doubting the fact that the fracturing of streaming content and the silos that are being built around that content are not a good thing. Examples of what was an ecosystem that mostly consisted of Netflix and Amazon being ruptured into streaming services offered by content producers themselves, such as Disney [...]

It shouldn't need to be said, but it bears repeating: the First Amendment definitely protects speech the listener doesn't like. This holds true even if the one doing the speaking is personally and professionally unlikable. There's some backstory to this First Amendment retaliation suit, which explains why certain government employees might have wanted to arrest [...]

I don't think I've ever had so many people send me a Streisand Effect" story as the one about a small town having nearly every copy of a newspaper stolen. Many people assumed that the culprit who stole the papers did so to try to perhaps protect the perpetrators of a sexual assault (or possibly [...]

A far-right state lawmaker in the Oklahoma state legislature has started his first term on the civil liberties shortbus. Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Republican lawmaker and Southern Baptist pastor, introduced a complete ban on consensual pornographydespite its First Amendment protections. Senate Bill 1976, sponsored by Deevers alone, features fascistic languagelooking to completely ban the viewing, [...]

Any school shooting is horrific. But the Uvalde school shooting went far beyond the usual nightmarish levels of something that happens so often in the United States, we can actually use the modifier usual." Police officers entered the school three minutes after the shooter did. But they did not actually end the terror until more [...]

Color is everywhere and, with the innovative Nix Mini 2, you can now capture and recreate it anywhere you go. This compact, portable, and highly sophisticated device is designed for those who find color inspiration in everyday life. Now, you can harness the power of technology to bring color into your creative, professional, or personal [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar's and Rep. Madeleine Dean's proposed NO AI FRAUD Act, which purports to protect Americans' individual right to their likeness and voice against AI-generated fakes and forgeries." Now, there are legitimate concerns about uses of generative AI tools to create fake images, videos, [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23 million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount. While it didn't get much hype, that's a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle due to muted competition. But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon [...]

Lots of tech is being thrown at cops with the intent of helping them work smarter. While this might sound like the early waves of a sea change, the end result - at least so far - is just more of the same stuff we've seen for decades. Crime rates may be at historic lows [...]

Last year, I wrote here about FutureCast, a very adaptable game" framework that was designed as a foresight tool, to help explore pathways to change. It was developed by myself and our partner in all things game related, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play. Randy and I created it in partnership with the United Nations Global [...]

I mean, there was no way not to see this coming. Last year we wrote about how Trump had lost his vexatious lawsuit against the NY Times regarding its interactions with his niece, Mary Trump. Mary had leaked some tax documents to the NY Times, and Trump sued the Times, arguing (laughably) that this constituted [...]

Journalists have long used Google News to track news cycles. But for years users have documented a steady decline in product quality parallel to similar complaints about the quality of Google's broader search technology. Many stories and outlets are often no longer indexed, low quality clickbait and garbage are everywhere, and customization seems broken as [...]

They're not sending their best." - Donald Trump, June 26, 2015 I hear ya, Donnie. Just look at the jamokes you've inspired to set fire to the Constitution, if only because they failed to set fire to Capitol Hill following the 2020 election. Florida's full of them. The state legislature is infested with people who [...]

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It's kind of pathetic how desperate Elon Musk is to convince people that ExTwitter is a good platform for posting their video content. I assume it's a perfectly okay place to post videos, but it's hardly where most people go to watch videos, and Elon may discover sooner or later just how difficult it is [...]

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute Twelve years ago, we released our very first research report, the Sky is Rising. Back then, in 2012, the commonly accepted wisdom was that the internet was killing various creative industries, from the music industry (especially!) to movies, TV, and books [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Ubisoft saying people need to get used to not owning games they play: What the world needs is a DRM-ed digital currency you can use for buying DRM-ed digital content. If the seller makes the product vanish, the buyer can [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an appeals court let the FBI off the hook for breaking the law during its Playpen investigation, while a federal judge said compelling people to unlock their phones with fingerprints or faces violates the Fifth Amendment, and another judge recommended vacating the sentence of one of the FBI's [...]

We've done a metric ton of posts here over the years pointing out one unfortunate trend that has come along with the move from physical products to digital purchases: you don't own what you've bought. In some cases, it's you don't own what you think you've bought, because nobody actually reads EULAs and all the [...]

Join our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! The latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928, is well underway. As always, we're calling on designers of all stripes and all levels of experience to put this year's newly public domain works to use in digital and analog [...]

The state-based attacks on social media take all different forms. And the specific attacks on TikTok are some of the most notable in how little state officials seem to care about basic concepts like the 1st Amendment. The most obvious example is Montana's failed attempt to just outright ban TikTok, but we've also seen other [...]

Things become heated and tangled when it comes to free speech, religion, and the government's attempt to control either of these things. Government entities tend to feel the best way to avoid the appearance of favoring any religion is to stay out of it completely. A wise move by the government, but not the best [...]

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Here are two separate stories regarding the mess that is modern copyright law, that is now mostly mediated" by companies that half-ass randomly deal with things and sometimes do not. While this is, perhaps, a better setup than stupidly suing kids for daring to like or share a song, it still suggests the entire copyright [...]

We've noted numerous times how U.S. communities are increasingly tired of substandard, expensive broadband caused by market failure, so they're building their own broadband networks at a record pace. These efforts take a wide variety of forms, whether it's via a local cooperative, a collection of municipalities, or a city owned utility (see Chattanooga's huge [...]

Last summer, we brought to you the delightful news that Trader Joe's had joined the list of bad-acting companies that were attempting to play stupid trademark games with their own employees' unions through bullshit trademark disputes and lawsuits. This appears to be something of a trend brewing, with other companies engaging in this same sort [...]

We're back with another post in our ongoing series on web monetization, the Error 402 series. Before the holidays, we had talked about some of the earlier attempts at monetizing content, which included paywalls, banner ads, search ads, and eventually concepts around upselling into premium services under the banner of freemium." I originally was going [...]

There's nothing more urbane than omnipresent surveillance, apparently. London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and... thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It's also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and soccer hooligans, with plenty of residents exhibiting all three of these traits simultaneously. [...]

Ron DeSantis continues to govern Florida as though the Constitution doesn't exist. It may froth the voting base a bit, but it's doing almost nothing for DeSantis, much less the people he's supposed to be serving. Law after unconstitutional law has been passed by the legislature, followed almost immediately by lawsuits and injunctions blocking the [...]

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The Florida legislature (with the support of goon-in-chief Ron DeSantis) really has a thing for unconstitutional bills that piss on the 1st Amendment. I mean, the state is still in a 1st Amendment fight with Mickey Mouse, which should tell you something. The Florida legislature is only in session at the beginning of the year, [...]

We've long established that U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, [...]

Field drug tests often seem to be more a triumph of imagination than a triumph of science. They're cheap. Some popular tests run less than $3/per. That's the literal selling point. When in doubt, a cop can get probable cause by grabbing a substance, dumping it into a field test, and deciding whatever results are [...]