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In our Moderator Mayhem mobile browser game that we released back in May, there are a couple of rounds where some AI is introduced to the process, as an attempt to help" the moderators. Of course, in the game, the AI starts making the kinds of mistakes that AI makes. That said, there's obviously a [...]

One of the common tests for whether something is trademark infringement is whether or not the public will be confused as to association between the infringer and another trademark owner. This typically comes down to several factors, such as the similarity within the uses and, importantly, whether the two entities compete in the same marketplace. [...]

A few weeks ago, the NY Times published a very nice profile piece about me, which starts off with the story of how I recently got pulled into a group chat with a bunch of Hollywood writers, directors, and actors, who were trying to understand how to deal with the rise of generative AI tools. [...]

Does watching porn threaten your masculinity? Science says it doesn't. Is porn addictive? No, it's not. Is sexual expression that is consenting legally protected by the First Amendment? Yes, it is. So, why do Republicans fight to restrict or outlaw pornography across the United States? There are several reasons. First, religious conservatives have long argued [...]

Last week, cops in a small Kansas town decided they'd just toss aside the First Amendment and raid a local newspaper. There were competing narratives. The first was that the paper was in possession of information related to the drunk driving arrest of local business owner Kari Newell, who had allegedly been convicted of DUI [...]

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Elon Musk hired Linda Yaccarino to be CEO" of exTwitter (despite saying he doesn't believe in the role of a CEO) because he desperately needed someone who worked well with advertisers to try to lure back some of the many, many, many advertisers who had fled the platform in disgust at what Elon has done [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill did some very good things for broadband. Not only did it include a massive, $42 billion investment in broadband deployment and require better mapping, it demanded that the FCC impose a new nutrition label for broadband," requiring that ISPs be transparent about all of the weird restrictions, caps, fees, and limitations [...]

Let me do a bit of throat-clearing at the top of this post. As a reminder, the general purpose of trademark laws around the world is to serve as a source-identifier for the public in those markets. In other words, allowing someone to trademark a unique identifier as to a source of a good or [...]

I don't think this is a surprise to anyone, but the SEC and the CFTC combined to issue fines on a bunch of Wall Street firms for execs communicating across encrypted messaging in a manner that wasn't recorded and preserved as required. Being in a regulated industry means having to deal with all sorts of [...]

Late last month, a report was released showing Connecticut State troopers were routinely faking stop data to avoid further scrutiny over biased policing efforts. According to the state governor's own statements, it appeared clear hundreds" of troopers faked tens of thousands" of traffic stops in order to make it look like they weren't just targeting [...]

Similar to the Age Appropriate Design Code" (AADC) legislation that became law last year,California's latest effort to regulate online speech comes in the form ofSB 680, a bill by Sen. Nancy Skinner targeting the designs, algorithms, and features of online services that host user-created content, with a specific focus on preventing harm or addiction risks [...]

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Welp, here we go again. Last month I wrote about how Techdirt had been deleted from both Bing and DuckDuckGo. Over on the discussion at HackerNews, DDG's CEO and founder, Gabriel Weinberg, jumped in to the conversation to note that this wasn't intentional (which we never suspected it was). The resulting conversation on HackerNews is [...]

For a long while now, we've pointed out how the privacy hyperventilation over singular threats like TikTok are a huge distraction from the fact Congress is simply too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. Or regulate the massive number of dodgy data brokers that buy, sell, and trade in [...]

More and more, as the video game industry matures, we find ourselves talking about game preservation and the disappearing culture of some older games as the original publishers abandon them. Often times leaving the public with no actual legit method for purchasing these old games, copyright law conspires with the situation to also prevent the [...]

Elon Musk's commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas has always been been a joke. Despite his repeated claims to being a free speech absolutist," and promising that his critics and rivals alike would be encouraged to remain on exTwitter, he has consistently shown that he has a ridiculously thin skin, and [...]

If you didn't know who Gigi Sohn was before her stalled-out FCC nomination and the ridiculous smear campaign that came with it, you surely do by now. And if you read Techdirt, you know she's one of the most experienced and passionate experts around when it comes to broadband. This week, she returns to the [...]

When will the legacy entertainment industry get it through their thick skulls that recording content is legal. We've done this. We've done it at the highest level. Tools that have substantial non-infringing uses are legal. Well, at least in the US. Which explains why the legacy companies often go overseas to do their dirty work. [...]

At one point, we had a functioning Constitutional Republic. Sure, it wasn't an actual democracy - the Electoral College still elected our president - but it seemed to function about as well as any major nation's government does, if not better on most occasions. Then things changed. For reasons I still can't understand, a failed [...]

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This one will take a bit of background to explain where things stand. As you likely know, two years ago first Florida and then Texas each signed laws that would restrict social media companies and how they moderate content on their platforms. Both laws were quickly challenged by two trade associations for internet companies: NetChoice [...]

Every few months a media outlet will get a staffer to write an inane story about how if you subscribe to every streaming service in existence, you'll unsurprisingly wind up paying almost as much as you'd pay for cable TV. The underlying message is usually that we haven't actually made real progress and that gosh, [...]

The more things change, etc. We'll never fully reject this country's racist history if we insist on stocking our police departments with racists. The horrific events described here do not exist in a vacuum. The officers who felt comfortable doing these things felt comfortable for several reasons. First, there's the long history of racist policing, [...]

It's important coming into this story to know and note that Rockstar, the publisher behind hit franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has waged a very public war on modding communities for its games for years now. Despite just how useful these modding communities tend to be in elongating the sales cycle [...]

On Friday, the Internet Archive put up a blog post noting that its digital book lending program was likely to change as it continues to fight the book publishers' efforts to kill the Internet Archive. As you'll recall, all the big book publishers teamed up to sue the Internet Archive over its Open Library project, [...]

The free press is supposed to be free. That's what the First Amendment means. Journalists have a long-acknowledged, supported-by-decades-of-precedent right to publish information that may make the government uncomfortable. When cops start raiding press outlets, everyone takes notice. This isn't how this works - not in the United States with its long list of guaranteed [...]

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I've talked before about the utter stupidity (and danger) of trying to turn the internet into Disneyland: a safe space for little kids, where they'll never encounter any content that makes them upset, but plenty of states (and many people in Congress) are trying to do it anyway. Wisconsin is the latest, and its Senate [...]

If you hadn't noticed, it's not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the growth for growth's sake" gods. Mergers, price hikes, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is jmcken with a comment about Benji Smith taking down his Prosecraft" tool, and specifically the frequent assertion that it matters where/how he got the books that formed its dataset: Think of it this way: If someone pirates a movie, that's unlawful. But if that [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, there were a few interesting studies and reports that deserved attention. One built on previous research showing that you beat piracy with innovation, not enforcement, and was echoed by similar results coming from the UK. On another front, a new report outlined how US telcos abandoned rural American [...]

Cops love shooting dogs almost more than they like casually violating constitutional rights. Even the DOJ called cop-on-dog violence an epidemic." Cops dress like warriors, plaster their cars with Punisher logos, declare themselves the thin blue line"... and then act like small woodland creatures the moment they encounter anything slightly unexpected. Guns, tasers, body armor, [...]

Microsoft has long been one of several companies that attempted to monopolize repair in a bid for profit, particularly when it has come to the company's game consoles. But in recent years the company appears to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, it might be smart [...]

This is and will keep happening. As complicated a landscape as copyright law is, the idea of automating the policing of copyright infringement without creating all kinds of collateral damage is simply absurd. Our pages are absolutely brimming with example after example of all kinds of entities issuing copyright claims and strikes on all kinds [...]

Three years ago we had the CEO of Jungle Scout, Greg Mercer, on our podcast, to debunk the claim that Amazon was unfairly competing with third party sellers in the Amazon marketplace. It's become somewhat accepted wisdom that Amazon is engaged in some sort of predatory behavior, looking at what products sell well with data [...]

It's a fact: You can violate a government employee's rights while being a government employee. Sure, it's more tricky than violating rights as a government employee (when targeting non-government employees), but it can still be done. Constitutional protections are a bit more limited for government employees, but they don't cease to exist. Every American has [...]

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Here on Techdirt we've chronicled the rise of a bunch of terrible age verification laws, including many focused specifically on adult content. We've also highlighted how MindGeek, the company behind a bunch of largest adult content sites, including Pornhub, have started geoblocking entire states in response to these problematic laws, while the Free Speech Coalition [...]

We've documented in detail how the series of mergers (AT&T->Time Warner->Discovery) that created the Warner Brothers Discovery entertainment empire may just be one of the most destructive, pointless, and incompetently managed business" transactions in modern media history. Since its beginning in 2016, the absurd saga has generated hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than50,000 [...]

There's a massive gap between how the policed view reasonable" policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to serve and protect" seem to prefer the polar opposite. We get opacity, violence, and insular behavior any time we [...]

Massachusetts is now poised to make calls for prison inmates and their families free. The decision comes after decades where the government's coddling of prison telecom monopolies resulted in inmate families being charged an arm and a leg simply to chat briefly with their incarcerated loved ones. According to Bolts, the reforms are part of [...]

Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We've covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there's actually some [...]

Facial recognition tech is faulty. It's an unavoidable fact, especially when it comes to women and minorities. No matter how good the tech, the potential for false positives and negatives remains. And pre-existing biases are amplified by things the tech simply can't do well: reliably identify people who aren't white and male. Detroit law enforcement [...]

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So, you might have heard the news about how Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a warrant for Donald Trump's Twitter account data, that Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000 before handing over the data, and (finally) that Twitter lost an appeal about all of this, leading to most of the details being unsealed by the [...]

Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operatingtelecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition,undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It's quite honestly starting to get a little weird. Whether it's the company'sGo90 video streaming platform,its video joint venture with RedBox,its news website Sugarstring(which [...]

If you go take a look at all the different posts we've done on the topic of Pokemon, you will be left with one undeniable conclusion: the people behind Pokemon content take IP rights very seriously. This has particularly been true when it comes to some of the franchise's most dedicated fans trying to express [...]

Sometimes, the best ideas for blog topics (or anything, really), come over a good meal with an amiable companion, and a few glasses of wine. As one does after a few glasses, my husband and I randomly ended up on the topic of data privacy - specifically, an aspect of data privacy and rights that [...]

As you may recall, we weren't fans of The Social Dilemma, the documentary manipulated people with misinformation in the course of complaining about that exact practice. But now there's a much better and more interesting documentary in the space, and one that's worth your time: The YouTube Effect by Alex Winter. It takes a deep [...]