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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 [...]

Big tech companies have long attempted to monopolize repair options to boost their profits, whether we're talking about tractors, phones, or game consoles. But in recent years companies like Apple and Microsoft appear to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, and right to repair seeing widespread, [...]

Last month, we wrote about Apple's nonsensical attack on Beeper, a universal messaging app that exemplifies many of the things we talk about here on Techdirt, like adversarial interoperability and the value of embracing open protocols over walled platforms. This week, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky joins us on the podcast to talk about the app, [...]

Last week I noted that the improperly named Common Sense Media had submitted a very problematic and dangerous California ballot initiative that aims to hold social media companies liable should any harm that happens to any child be loosely connected to social media. As we noted, the research out there does not support the underlying [...]

Most courts recognize prior restraint as a First Amendment violation. Most courts. Not all. And the lower you go on the judicial organization chart, the more likely you are to run into a judge who doesn't seem to realize the Constitution exists. The problem for people being sued in state and county courts is that [...]

Headway is 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 personal development, business strategies, or health insights, Headway has you covered. It's on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt [...]

If you buy products on Amazon, you're well aware of the Amazon brand spammers. These tend to be drop shippers or small (often Chinese) operations trying to sell knockoffs of whatever products might sell. But the products need brand names. In early 2020, the NY Times did an article about the phenomenon, All Your Favorite [...]

While the telecom industry did manage to successfullydefang U.S. consumer protection regulatorsfor the better part of the last decade, they're still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth hasdramatically slowed, cable TV customers areleaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that money is [...]

Techdirt has been covering the UK's awful Online Safety Act for nearly five years now. During that time it has changed name - it was originally called the Online Harms Bill - but the many bad ideas have remained. Some have even become worse. For example, the UK government said that it wouldn't enforce the [...]

We've expressed our displeasure with geofence warrants multiple times. I've often referred to them as reverse" warrants, a term that implies how these warrants invert probable cause. Those in the business of protecting rights (ACLU, EFF) aren't fans of that term, but it is useful shorthand. Rather than show a court probable cause exists to [...]

Every year a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments, looking at what people were interested in, what commenters were highly rated, etc. I know most sites put this out towards the end of the year, but I remain a purist and wait until after [...]

Even though the blog is now often given over to Trump did nothing wrong" posts and suggestions that social media services engage in censorship" of so-called conservatives" (and don't even think about wandering into the comment section), Eugene Volokh's Volokh Conspiracy still surfaces some very interesting cases. And this one has a lot going on. [...]

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On Monday, Elon Musk tweeted To fear parody or criticism is a sign of weakness." If true, then this is Elon admitting to an astounding level of weakness. I mean, we've been chronicling for nearly two years now how Elon Musk talks a good game on free speech, but at every opportunity he's had, he [...]

It's extremely weird that we've somehow normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, and marketers have made the U.S.' primary voice communication platform largely unusable. There is some good news: according to data from the YouMail Robocall Index, U.S. consumers received just under 3.8 billion robocalls during the month of December, a 16.3% decrease [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about the dangerous protect the children" ballot initiative in California: That is not a protect the children law, that is an I hate social media and it must be destroyed law. In second place, it's Blake Stacey passing on the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at how Ajit Pai's FCC often battled FOIA requests for no reason, while the Department of the Interior was trying to rewrite FOIA law to make it easier to reject requests. We saw fresh examples of copyright abuse as a means of silencing criticism of a [...]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has something of a rollercoaster history when it comes to the enforcement of its real, or perceived, intellectual property rights. On the one hand, the church has occasionally been quite lenient when it comes to not trying to battle every use of its name, traditions, or religious [...]

Dating can be difficult, but there are certain things you can do to not make things worse on yourself. Don't be a creep. Be kind. Take no for an answer. Actually listen to the people you date. I mean, that's kinda the standard stuff. But also, if things go bad and they complain about you [...]

Everyone's aware (or should be) that all calls made from jail are monitored. Not all calls are recorded. There are exceptions, with the biggest being the one for calls made to attorneys representing jailed people. Those are completely off-limits. These are privileged communications that cannot be monitored or recorded by the government. And yet, it [...]

It's pretty amazing to me just how wrong one Senator can be about the internet for years and years and years. But we've been writing about Senator Richard Blumenthal and never, ever letting his own confusion about the internet get in the way of him boldly making foolish claims about the internet since before he [...]

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There are lots of things you can call veteran Cincinnati police officer Ryan Olthaus. Some people called him a racist, after he appeared to flash the ok" sign (something associated with [but not limited to] white supremacists) at anti-police violence protesters. You can also call him a coward. After all, he couldn't be bothered to [...]

We've long noted how the U.S. has generally proven too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law or regulate data brokers. The result has been a long line of companies that over-collect all manner of sensitive consumer location and behavior data, fail to secure it, and sell access to it to pretty much any [...]

The bad times for Unity continue, it seems. Or, at the very least, for the ostensibly hardworking men and women that called the company home. The bad times really began late last summer when Unity decided to drastically change its pricing scheme both for future projects that used the game engine, and, somehow, retroactively as [...]

A law passed last year has now taken effect in California. This attempt to limit pretextual stops and biased policing means California law enforcement officers will no longer be able to start every traffic stop with an impromptu Q&A session. They'll have to get right to the point. Here's what the law says: (a) A [...]

In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live this week, 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 [...]

Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things. About that. [...]

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Law enforcement officers learned long ago that if all they have is a crime scene and no likely suspects, there was no reason to wear out shoe leather beating the streets for alleged criminals. They don't even need to leave the office. All they have to do is produce a subpoena for certain third-party records [...]

Hewlett Packard (HP) has been socked with yet another lawsuit for crippling the printers of consumers who use cheaper third-party ink cartridges. The lawsuit, filed by eleven plaintiffs in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, states that HP misleadingly used its Dynamic Security" firmware updates to create a monopoly" over replacement printer [...]

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, [...]

Public records requesters in California recently scored a small victory in one of the state's appeals courts. The EFF, which filed an amicus brief in this case, summarizes the decision at its website. Video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public, a California [...]

Last year, soon after Elon completed his purchase of (then) Twitter, I wrote up a 20 level speed run" of the content moderation learning curve. It seems like maybe some of the folks at Substack should be reading it these days? As you'll recall, last April, Substack CEO Chris Best basically made it clear that [...]

December was not just busy with Supreme Court briefs. The Copia Institute also joined many others, including copyright scholars and public interest organizations, in filing an amicus brief to support the Internet Archive's appeal at the Second Circuit, seeking to overturn the troubling ruling holding its Open Library to be copyright infringement. We've written about [...]

Things are still batshit insane in the Florida legislature. Again. Apparently, the state's government won't be satisfied until it's attempted to violate every single constitutional amendment (except the 2nd!) via godawful bills crafted by godawful people. The latest insanity is a bill [PDF] written by state senator Jason Brodeur. It aims to completely rewrite defamation [...]

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On Tuesday morning, former politician Tulsi Gabbard, who had to have the 1st Amendment clearly explained to her by a judge after she filed a ridiculous lawsuit to restrict the free speech of others, announced that she had cut a deal with Elon Musk to bring a news show" to ExTwitter. Hilariously, she claimed that [...]

Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows [...]

As all manner of content creators will tell us, copyright enforcement is both very important and is at least doable enough that it sure would be nice if platforms like YouTube could do even more to enforce those rights for content creators. This mantra will typically come from those that are the most aggressive and [...]

Across the nation, bigoted politicians (of the Republican variety, almost exclusively) are trying to punish and silence content and expression they don't like. It's not like it's even a close question about who's doing this and why. A slew of bills targeting drag shows and LGBTQ+ writing have been tossed into legislatures all over the [...]

We're back from the holidays, and it's time for a new episode of the Techdirt Podcast! This week, we're joined by Ravi Iyer, Research Director for the USC Marshall School's Neely Center and Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute, to discuss a proposed design code" that aims to make social media better serve [...]

There's plenty of hypocrisy and bad faith to go around in the ridiculous Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal. While Gay's accusers are right that she technically violated Harvard's plagiarism rules by copying phrases either without quotation marks or required attribution, they don't actually care about plagiarism, only scalping" Gay. What's more, their own plagiarism accusations have [...]

It was a busy December for the Copia Institute (and me), even just at the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to filing (along with Bluesky and Mastodon admin Chris Riley) an amicus brief supporting NetChoice and CCIA in their combined cases, we also filed another one challenging the bizarre injunction imposed by the Fifth Circuit [...]

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Go NetChoice go. The trade group has been going around the country and blocking all the bad state level social media laws. Early on (with CCIA) it sued to stop Texas and Florida's problematic laws. Last year it sued successfully to stop laws in Arkansas and California. Just a few weeks ago it sued Utah [...]

Early last year new journalism outlet named The Messenger" launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing anda lot of chatterabout how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism. Finkelstein claimed he wanted to build an alternative to a national [...]

Nearly four years ago, we discussed the online superhero game City of Heroes, which had been shut down officially by NCSoft, but which had survived in the shadows due to some fan-run servers. That story from 2019 was fairly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it stood in contrast to some similar instances where [...]

Between the holidays, and to minimal fanfare, the FCC released a decision in the 2018 Quadrennial Review of Media Ownership policy. The timing of the release was no surprise, as the agency had been ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to conclude the proceeding by December 27th. The FCC's decision, which made only [...]

As most of you will readily recall, last summer there was quite a lot of attention paid to a case involving a lawyer who had submitted a brief in a personal injury case that had a whole bunch of made up case citations. After this was brought to the attention of the judge, the lawyer [...]