Techdirt

Just when it finally looked like the FBI's year of abuse might catch up to it, it (along with the NSA and other beneficiaries of this surveillance authority) has been granted a four-month reprieve. The FBI made a lot of enemies with its continuous abuse of this surveillance authority - a foreign-facing collect it all" [...]

Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at [...]

Over the last few years we've pointed out time and time again that the evidence regarding the supposed harm" of social media to teen mental health just isn't supported by the data. But it seems it's never enough to stop savior-complex folks in the media, the advocacy community, and the political class from insisting it [...]

Back in 2019, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge proudly declared that the trend of cord cutting - or people ditching traditional cable television and switching to streaming - was finally coming to an end. According to Rutledge, the worst was now behind the cable industry, and the trend was finally slowing down. Yeah, about that. According [...]

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to worrisome ruling in California that denied Section 230 protections to Snapchat because it has disappearing messages. In first place, it's radix with thoughts on the potential implications: I can't wait for every document shredding company to be swept up in every [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we kicked off the new year with a copyright lawsuit over dance moves in Fortnite, while the EU made its first attempt at listing pirate sites and included a bunch of non-infringing sites. Similarly, we looked at how antipiracy outfits routinely claim copyright infringement against sites that simply [...]

I'm always heartened to see another local news team start digging into asset forfeiture. Especially the ones that don't sugarcoat the findings with headlines that read like they were crafted by law enforcement officials. Charlotte, North Carolina's NBC affiliate, WCNC, tells it like it is. Although it puts quotes around a couple of phrases, it [...]

It's no secret that there are mountains of examples of companies and individuals attempting to use intellectual property laws merely to silence critics and disappear information from the internet. While I'm sure this sort of thing must somtimes work, it's also quite common for these would-be censorial folks to be introduced to the Streisand Effect [...]

The technological marvel of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, developed by AI engineers and experts, has posed a unique challenge in the realm of copyright law. These advanced AI systems, which undergo extensive training on diverse datasets, including copyrighted material, and provide output highly dependent on user prompts," have raised questions about the bounds [...]

The banal will never capture as much attention as the lurid. I'm sure that this opening sentence will be seized upon by the many critics of my posts criticizing cops. So be it. Just be aware that we expect our public servants to be banal at almost any cost. That's a sign of competence and [...]

Dive into Godot - a rising star in the game engine world. You'll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you'll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation - giving you the ultimate techniques to [...]

Okay, look, at this point, we need to start calling out those in positions of power who insist that it's unquestionable that social media is harmful to kids when the don't present any evidence at all to back up those assertions. Because as we've been documenting, every single study that comes out these days seems [...]

While Comcast's streaming service Peacock has now reached 30 million subscribers, Comcast has been taking an absolute bath on the proposition. Comcast CEOMike Cavanagh says the company lost nearly $3 billion dollars on the effort last year alone. The other streaming giants haven't fared a whole lot better. Warner Bros Discovery, Disney, and Paramount all [...]

The war on China's video game industry by the Chinese government continues, but it appears that its casualties aren't only within the industry itself. Over the last couple of years, the Chinese government has put more and more restrictions on the gaming industry, primarily aimed at youths, that were designed for everything from restricting how [...]

If you love to irrationally hate, you'll hate this. The Iowa legislature recently shat out a bill that allowed the state to start punishing people for not being straight and/or white. It was signed into law by another hateful person, Governor Kim Reynolds - the head of (this) state that recently made it clear she's [...]

On January 1, 2024, the parent company of Pornhub.com geo-blocked adult users in the states of Montanaand North Carolina. Aylo, the site's corporate parent, said they did so in protest to laws these states adopted requiring adult platforms to verify their users' ages through various age-check tools. This isn't the first time Aylo geo-blocked IP [...]

Master the core concepts of coding with the 2024 Intro to Coding & Development Bundle. You'll learn to work with some of the world's most popular languages, including C++, Java, Swift, Kotlin, Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Plus, you'll explore these fundamentals and more while learning to build portfolio-ready apps, games, and websites - testing [...]

Regulatory agencies can often be an essential part of day-to-day life, preventing people from engaging in activities they have no expertise in - something that could potentially endanger a lot of people. But they can also be overbearing brutes whose only concern is whether or not they've managed to extract as much money as possible [...]

Well, this is dumb. As detailed by NBC News, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff has rejected a perfectly reasonable attempt by SnapChat to have a lawsuit thrown out on Section 230 grounds. The case involves family members of kids who overdosed on illegal drugs like fentanyl, suing Snap for apparently providing the connection [...]

During Trump's tenure, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The Trump FCC stripped away a lot of the rules [...]

Let's roll into the new year by saying what needs to be said: if you're arguing against government transparency, you're on the wrong side of history. But being on the wrong side of history is just something cops love to do. They figure the short term wins - if there are any - might somehow [...]

As you well know, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain in the US, meaning you can use a version of that Mickey (or any other newly public domain work) in our Gaming Like It's 1928 Public Domain Game Jam. Also, we're already seeing some of the expected effort [...]

Thanks to politicians (including a former president) being overly willing to scratch the bigoted itch of a voting bloc that appears to prefer the brutal caress of fascism to the freedoms of a democratic republic, far too many state and local legislators are crafting and enacting laws designed to relegate a whole lot of the [...]

A few months ago we noted that Fidelity, which had contributed over $300 million to help Elon purchase Twitter a little over a year ago, had already marked down its investment by 65%. This news came out at basically the same time that Elon himself admitted the company's value was down 56% (from $44 billion [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

Israeli malware developer NSO Group found itself the subject of international headlines a couple of years ago. Not the good kind either. A leaked document apparently showed who was being targeted by the company's cell phone exploits - a long, disturbing list that contained journalists, lawyers, activists, dissidents, religious leaders, and plenty of politicians. The [...]

Last month we noted how a program aimed at helping low income Americans afford broadband was at risk of being dismantled thanks to congressional incompetence and corruption. The FCC program, dubbed the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill. It provides low-income Americans $30 off their monthly broadband bill. 22 million [...]

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 [...]