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Back in May of this year, the USPTO put out a request for public comments from interested parties in how to modernize its policies and/or copyright law to combat counterfeiting and online piracy. The world's easiest prediction would have been that the copyright industries would request more stringent copyright rules and heavier and faster policing [...]

In the past I've sometimes described Australia as the land where internet policy is completely upside down. Rather than having a system that protects intermediaries from liability for third party content, Australia went the opposite direction. Rather than recognizing that a search engine merely links to content and isn't responsible for the content at those [...]

This Apple Watch Portable USB Charger allows you to charge anytime, anywhere. With a built-in magnetic adsorption module, you can charge your watch immediately after contact. This charger has the ability to charge your watch within 2 to 3 hours fully. It's lightweight and portable, so you can charge your watch while traveling, when working [...]

We have covered the Protecting Kids On Social Media Act a few times, when it was first introduced back in April, where we highlighted how it was both unconstitutional and the rationale behind it was not supported by any actual evidence, and then again just recently when Senator Chris Murphy (one of the bill's co-sponsors) [...]

Of all the things we cover here at Techdirt, content producers going legal on pure fan-made productions that amount to fans expressing their fandom will always be the most befuddling for me. All the more so when it comes to content that was essentially kept alive by this same sort of fan-made work. Take the [...]

Last July,we noted howmedia reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News' local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News' rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the character clause" embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should hold a [...]

The states have gone rogue. In the last year alone, at least nine states enacted internet censorship laws. And more legislators are promising to take up the cause. But these laws are directly at odds with the First Amendment's command that the government shall not abridge the freedom of speech. Undeterred, states passed laws restricting [...]

Cops and cop tech providers like to pretend the things they use and the things they do are so black ops the public should not be allowed to discuss them with anyone, much less the defendants, judges, and juries being asked to weigh evidence and render verdicts in criminal trials. A lot of supposedly secret [...]

Capable of removing up to 10 times more plaque than a traditional brush, the AquaSonic Black Series Toothbrush gives your pearly whites the TLC they deserve. This high-end brush allows you to customize your brushing experience with soft, whiten, massage, and cleaning modes. Plus, the 40,000 VPM motor provides a deep clean while dissolving stains [...]

We need a federal anti-SLAPP law and strong state anti-SLAPP laws in all 50 states. And we need that as soon as possible. Anti-SLAPP/free speech law may not be as sexy these days as antitrust law, but, well, law shouldn't be particularly sexy. Or involve much sex at all. Joshua Wright apparently felt otherwise. Over [...]

Former T-Mobile CEO John Legererepeatedly promised in printthat the Sprint merger would result in amassivesurge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at deal critics predicting job losses, the charming, potty-mouthed ex-CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be job positive from day one" and every day thereafter. [...]

I swear, with some of the trademark stories we cover, it ends up feeling like we should have Yakety Sax playing on loop in the background for the readers. That's certainly my sense when it comes to The Day Befores trademark struggles as of late. Where to start? Well, let's start with the basics: is [...]

The government's preference for geofence (a.k.a. reverse") is well known. There have been enough cases and enough litigation in recent years to demonstrably show the government will go to data havens when searching for suspects rather than engage in in-person investigative work. Why canvass a neighborhood for potential suspects when you can ask Google to [...]

Social media isn't the first phenomenon to spark a moral panic about its impact on people's (and especially young people's) mental health, and it surely won't be the last - but for now, it's the star of the show. A lot of people will gladly latch on to, and casually misrepresent, any research that might [...]

We've talked a lot about questions regarding AI and copyright over the last few years, highlighting repeatedly that AI-created works cannot be covered by copyrights. No matter how many times we've pointed this out, some are still trying, and it was nice to see yet another court (not the first) again say that AI-created works [...]

Law enforcement officers just don't seem to have a sense of humor. Sure, they may laugh when they beat, humiliate, or otherwise violates citizens' rights, but they can't seem to take a joke when it's pointed in their direction. Not being able to recognize an obvious joke has ensured two members of the Rapides Parish [...]

Design Wizard is an easy-to-use graphic design software that will add magic to your marketing and put the sparkle in your social media. With its features, you can magically resize your designs, upload your fonts, photos, logos, and create custom color palettes. Its library has over 1 million premium images, illustrations, graphics, and more.It's on [...]

What, Elon Musk is a hypocrite? Who knew? You may recall that last year, after directly promising that he'd leave up the ElonJet account, which reveals public information regarding the flights of Elon Musk's private plane, he changed his mind and banned it, along with any reporter who even mentioned the existence of the account [...]

Eager to maintain a lucrative repair monopoly over its products, Apple has had a long history of bullying independent repair shops. Apple lobbyists have also falsely claimed that making its products easier and less expensive to repair would result in vast untold consumer privacy and security nightmares, turning states that consider right to reform" legislation [...]

I'm certainly not the first person to make this point, but the only thing that's really going to prevent truly bullshit copyright infringement lawsuits from being filed in the first place is when bad actors get hit in the pocketbook. One of the most common ways that actually occurs is through courts ordering plaintiffs in [...]

One thing that the old Twitter was pretty good for was getting help on customer service problems. Rather than having to call customer service lines and wait on hold for hours on end only to be given the run around, many people found that complaining on Twitter was a lot faster and more helpful (likely, [...]

One can only assume the Marion, Kansas police department felt this would never be this big. Overconfidence is a killer, as the MPD can surely attest, albeit after the fact. The raid of the Marion County Record is now international news, thanks in large part to the flagrant First Amendment violations. Then there's the fact [...]

Election season is approaching, so I fully expect this nonsense to come right back again, but maybe with a court shutting it down, culture war nonsense peddlers can move on to some other nonsense? The background: in the runup to the 2022 U.S. elections, a prominent Republican digital marketing" (read: political spam) shop noticed that [...]

Familiar with both front- and back-end development, full-stack developers know the programming process from top to bottom, making them tremendously valuable (and highly paid) pros in their field. Jump into this full-stack primer, and you'll learn how to build your own programming projects from start to finish. You'll get up to speed with core tools, [...]

For years, the UK government has sought to expand its surveillance powers. And, for years, it has rarely been prevented from doing so. Sure, there's been a bunch of bureaucratic inactivity and unforced errors (like Brexit) that make it a bit more difficult to push legislation through, but the UK government's thirst for more power [...]

Countless companies and industries enjoy making up scary stories when it comes to justifying their opposition to making it easier to repair your own tech. Apple claims that empowering consumers and bolstering independent repair shops will turn states into hacker meccas." The car industry insists that making it easier and cheaper to repair modern cars [...]

It's been a while since this last happened, but we've got a double-winning comment this week, taking the first place spot on both the funny and insightful leaderboards. And it's an anonymous comment too, responding to Elon Musk's plans to add ID-based verification to Twitter: I have complete confidence that the man notorious for not [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, after years of fighting, Prenda boss Paul Hansmeier followed the path of John Steele and pleaded guilty to mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ was trying to force Facebook to break encryption on voice calls, the EU was moving forward with legislation [...]

It's always nice when you get several stories in a row that contrast with one another in order to make a point. We were just discussing Rockstar's decision to scoop up a roleplaying and modding community in order to build in new and interesting ways to play GTA and Red Dead Redemption games. What I [...]

Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition bybuying a small Virginia ISPby the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing" to a broken broadband market [...]

As you'll recall, Montana passed a law earlier this year to ban TikTok (and ban mobile app stores from offering TikTok for download). The bill has lots of problems, not the least of which was that Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen flat out told the NY Times that the purpose of the bill was to [...]

In 2014, the Supreme Court made it clear: phone searches require warrants. While it did note the case involved a search incident to an arrest," the precedent was undeniable. If a phone search attached to an arrest requires a warrant, it would logically follow that any phone search by law enforcement - even those not [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and Bluetooth earbuds. With its [...]

There is no space for nuanced discussion about reality any more, as it seems that nonsense floods the zone. So, please try to follow along here as there needs to be some nuance to finally get down to the details of this issue. It's nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the hyperventilation about TikTok privacy is largely just a distraction from the U.S.' ongoing failure to pass even a basic privacy law or meaningfully regulate data brokers. We haven't done those things for two reasons. One, the dysfunctional status quo (where companies mindlessly over-collect data and fail to secure it, resulting [...]

Earlier this summer, we talked about Trader Joe's joining the list of large companies combatting unionization efforts through the most petty of methods: complaining about those unions over trademark infringement." Trader Joe's isn't the first company to go down this route of course, as we've seen Walmart and Medieval Times have behaved similarly. Nor will [...]

This case involves both civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. First one, then the other. Not that the order matters as much as the government's unwillingness to do much more than sit on the $30,000 in cash they took from an Ohio couple during a supposed drug investigation. Civil forfeiture allows the government to keep seized [...]

Back in June, we wrote about a ridiculously weak lawsuit from the big music publishers against exTwitter, claiming that the platform, mostly known for text, and which barely has any reasonable system for posting or listening to music, was a music piracy haven. As we noted, the publishers' lawsuit seemed misguided in multiple ways, beyond [...]

I guess the feeling was that some protesters needed to be arrested. And when most protesters are protesting cops, it's probably a whole lot easier to go after those that aren't. That's how this lawsuit got started. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, protests against police violence began all [...]

Podurama is a leading podcast player with a collection of more than 30 million podcasts in every genre. The app makes it easy to organize your podcasts into folders or create multiple playlists of your favorite episodes. You can also take notes or bookmark within an audio. Very few podcast players have the ability to [...]

Stephen Thaler has spent years trying, and almost always failing, to convince both patent and copyright bodies to give him patents and copyrights on works he says are created by AI systems he's built. He's failed at this process. A lot. I mean, really, a lot. His latest attempt was to sue the Copyright Office [...]

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has backed off of its ill-advised opposition to right to repair after presumably getting an earful from reformers and the Biden administration. This past June, NHTSA issued guidance advising the auto industry to basically ignore Massachusetts' new right to repair law, which required that all modern vehicle systems [...]

Pretextual stops are law enforcement's favorite way to fish for larger catches. Any minor moving violation can predicate a stop. That leads to conversations - often non-consensual - with drivers and passengers. Any number of factors can be opportunistically read by officers to add up to reasonable suspicion." Once that develops," the party begins. Cars, [...]

Well, this certainly isn't an outcome I would have predicted. While the saga of Microsoft's attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has certainly taken a long and winding road, as it stands today all the regulatory hurdles have seemingly been cleared save for the UK's Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). Unlike the FTC's challenge to the [...]

Clearview has suffered tons of self-inflicted damage during its relatively short life as a viable, if execrable, product. Always willing to put its worst foot forward, the company built an AI backbone to support its voluminous webscraping, gathering up everything that wasn't locked down on the internet and applying its facial recognition algorithm to it. [...]

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon's personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it's for esthetic" reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just [...]

As a child, nothing warmed me more than my mother's Three C's Soup": Cabbage, Carrot, Carraway from Jane Brody's Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (published in 1980 and still in print, no ebook version has yet been licensed). And when my mother died in late fall 2018, there was nothing I wanted [...]

Headway is an app that will help you develop the most powerful learning habits and make sure you're always armed with the best book ideas, bite-sized learning for fun and easy growth, and essential knowledge to crush your goals. Whether you want to build a business, improve your health, or succeed at work, we've got [...]

Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote an NY Times op-ed piece a few weeks ago (there's so much nonsense all the time that it takes a little while to find the time to respond to all of it), claiming that Algorithms are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy." He wrote this in support of his The Protecting [...]