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The depressing tale of how the European Union passed copyright's worst new law, the EU Copyright Directive, occupies some 36 pages in Walled Culture the book (digital versionsavailable free). The main legislation was finalized over four years ago, but countries are still grappling with the problem of implementing its sometimes contradictory requirements in national laws. [...]

Just fucking fight it out already. The whole stupid cage match" brawl thing was started when Meta execs made some (accurate) cracks about Elon's management of Twitter, and Elon couldn't handle it. But, now with the launch of Meta's Threads, Elon feels the need to send a ridiculously laughable legal threat to Meta. Elon's legal [...]

Never mind fitting the description, even though that, too, has its own problems. In Texas, it apparently only matters how your name is spelled. If you share a name with a criminal suspect, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said you have no recourse if you're wrongly arrested and detained for multiple days. That [...]

As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I've seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single Twitter killer" everyone's been waiting for, to [...]

Last week's 6-3 decision in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, with all the conservative justices vindicating a website designer's ability to refuse to build a website celebrating gay marriage, may seem at first glance to be a blow to gay rights. And maybe that's what some or all of the six justices in the [...]

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One has to think that Donald Trump judicial appointee Judge Terry Doughty deliberately waited until July 4th (when the courts are closed) to release his ruling on the requested preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from communicating with social media companies. The results of the ruling are not a huge surprise, given Doughty's now recognized [...]

We've documented extensively how the AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery mergers have been a gargantuan pointless mess, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, widespread animosity across Hollywood, the death or decay of numerous popular brands (from Mad Magazine to HBO), weird holes in streaming catalogs, and just a shittier, dumber product overall. While the first [...]

Does this look like someone carrying a gun? That's from a recent federal court decision [PDF], granting defendant Luis Cerda's motion to suppress. NYPD sergeant Christopher Colon saw something else. He saw a gun. He needed to see a gun. He was so desperate to bust someone else entirely (Alberto Santiago, a.k.a. Dot Com") that [...]

One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against [...]

We, as a nation, spend hundreds of billions every year to ensure law enforcement agencies are staffed well enough to provide, at best, semi-competent service. We spend billions every year on lawsuit settlements generated by officers who can't even manage to provide semi-competent service without violating constitutional rights. You get what you pay for, they [...]

Way back in 2005 I wrote about the launch of Amazon Prime, talking about the trade offs of joining this shipping club" as I called it then. If you look at that post now, it has nearly 600 comments. However, the first comment didn't even get added until over a year after I posted the [...]

Cyber security. It's complicated. Protecting against threats means determining what your threat level is. Demanding everyone utilize a 53-character password with uppercase letters, numbers, and special symbols" generally just makes people more irritated, rather than more secure. Obviously, things must be secured. And passwords shouldn't be so simple that anyone with an off-the-shelf HP desktop [...]

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Our most popular post last year was my post attempting to help Elon Musk speedrun" the content moderation learning curve. People still talk to me about that post to this day. What's been somewhat surprising to me, however, is that while nearly every other social media site eventually figures out the basics of the content [...]

One of the benefits of the shift to streaming music and video was supposed to be (and often is), convenience. As in, you'd have access to any show you'd like, at any time, without having to go hunting and pecking through old VHS archives. And while streaming delivered on many of its original promises, as [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone passing on an update on the Reddit protests: Also worth noting: The official subreddit for Minecraft got a little less official earlier this week: As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a court shut down attempts by ISPs to use the net neutrality repeal to dodge lawsuits for bad service, while California was trying to keep its push for its own net neutrality law alive (at the same time as lobbyists were descending on the state to shape a [...]

The ignorance of cops is almost always their saving grace. If they can't reasonably" know the intricacies of the laws they uphold or the rights they're supposed to respect, they're too stupid to be punished for their wrongdoing. That's how qualified immunity works. And that's why it behooves police departments to keep officers in the [...]

I continue to be fascinated in watching how the various decentralized protocol-based social media systems are evolving - in particular how they're dealing with the challenges of content moderation. There was an interesting discussion a recently on nostr over whether or not moderation should be best handled by relays or clients*. ActivityPub has, of course, [...]

Mandatory age verification rules are entering force in Mississippi and Virginia. Mississippi has a population of barely 3 million people. Virginia has a population of over 8.6 million people. Like Utah (population over 3 million) back in May, one of the world's most popular adult tube websites chose to block IP addresses from both of [...]

Lots of states are pitching, passing, or enacting bills effectively banning drag shows. Piggybacking on existing regulations governing adult entertainment, hateful people are seeking to punish people who don't happily abide by the there are two genders" social construct. Fortunately, these people are losing. A federal court recently dumped Utah's attempt to punish drag performers [...]

This isn't a huge surprise, as they'd already suggested they would do this, but Google has announced officially that it will block news links in Canada to avoid having to pay to send traffic to Canadian news sources. We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to [...]

An anonymous Louisiana cop who sued, in this order: still manages to have a viable lawsuit seven years later. It boggles the mind. Officer John Doe was policing an anti-police violence protest allegedly organized by activist Deray Mckesson. This demonstration resulted in the blocking of a freeway, resulting in a significant police presence. Someone in [...]

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You don't need to be some fortune teller to predict some of this stuff. A year ago, after he had announced his plans to buy Twitter (but before he tried to back out, and then was eventually forced to complete the purchase), we were horrified to see Elon Musk meet with the top EU's Commissioner [...]

We just got done noting how the AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Bros Discovery mergers just keep on demonstrating the absolutely pointlessness of most media mergers. The combined companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on elaborate, costly acquisitions that never got close to delivering the kind of synergies" dealmakers promised. Instead, the string of mergers resulted in [...]

We've spent a good deal of time talking about burger chain In-N-Out's habit for engaging in trademark tourism all over the globe. If you're not familiar with how this works, the company will apply for a trademark in various countries, all of which typically have use requirements in order to maintain the mark, and then [...]

There are some fairly strict rules about communicating with government agency employees regarding some matter that they're adjudicating, without making those communications public. We want whatever administrative state we have to have any attempts to influence outcomes to be public for all to see. That's why agencies have rules regarding what's known as ex parte" [...]

For years we've noted how cable companies routinely screw you over with all manner of bullshit fees. One Consumer Reports study found that roughly 25 percent of your cable bill is made up of completely nonsensical fees, designed to let companies advertise one rate, then sock you with a much higher bill. It's estimated this [...]

The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators - who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful [...]

When I was but a wee Techdirt boy, the FBI was telling cop shops that had borrowed or obtained Stingray devices they'd best not talk about it in court or it would be their NDA'ed ass on the line. In 2015, documents the FBI hoped no one would see (and actually told local cops they [...]

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I don't know how many times it needs to be said, but since so many are still insisting the opposite is true, I guess many more times: Twitter's moderation policies were not driven by some anti-conservative bias, nor were they pushed by the government to block Trump or his supporters. We have, of course, discussed [...]

This week the Biden administration basically re-announced the $42.5 billion in broadband funding that will soon start flowing to the states to shore up U.S. broadband access. Despite press reports that this funding is somehow new, it came as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Not too surprisingly, numerous Republicans that voted [...]

Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with itsFan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach. At the time, we noted that it was a kind of halfway house to thetrue fansidea this blog has promoted many times. We also pointed out that one [...]

Look, we were not kind when Genius first accused Google of copying lyrics from its site. The only interesting bit was the cleverness with which Genius figured out Google had copied the lyrics from its site, by sneakily adding in curved or non-curved apostrophes to see if the same ones showed up in Google's version [...]

We just got done noting how the FCC has spent most of the last decade under the bootheel of the telecom lobby, and in an era where all DC policy is fixated on big tech," (often for very good reasons) nobody much seems to care or have noticed. For four years under Trump, the FCC [...]

Lately, concerns about allowing minors to use social media have been front and center in the public discourse, but ways in which they use it productively have been absent from the conversation. My own anecdotal experience does not constitute comprehensive data, but it's important to understand how social media can be extremely useful for teens [...]

The UK government desires direct control of the internet. This has been the plan for years. A bill that would criminalize encryption while mandating client-side scanning to control the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been on the front burner for years. The bill would also turn hate speech into a crime and [...]

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A few months back I attended a workshop regarding keeping children on the internet safe, and at some point a debate broke out over whether social media was more like" cigarettes or chocolate (i.e., obviously addictive and harmful or just a little unhealthy in large doses), and a long term trust & safety executive who [...]

So a few weeks ago Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai came out of hiding to issue a dumb blog post about how killing net neutrality must not have been a bad idea because the internet still works. In his post, he prattles on about how secretly wonderful the U.S. broadband industry is, proving that his [...]

It's crazy just how many posts we've done here on the subject of tattoos. But if you go and review the posts we have done on this topic, you will notice that the majority of them involve tattoo artists as the ones asserting intellectual property rights, not those who got the tattoo on their person. [...]

There have been plenty of laws passed to keep prisoners from profiting from depictions of their crimes, encompassing not only their own recountings, but those put together by others. These so-called Son of Sam" laws got their name from serial killer David Berkowitz, who authorities speculated was going to sell off the rights to his [...]

Recently, we announced our latest game project: FutureCast, created in partnership with the United Nations' Global Pulse group. It's a highly adaptable strategic forecasting tool that aims to explore pathways of change" for different future scenarios by bringing together groups of stakeholders for a fun, insight-generating exercise. This week, we're joined by Minke Meijnders and [...]

One of Elon's big promises when he took over Twitter was that he would get rid of spam bots. So far that's been a huge fucking failure. That's from the Wall Street Journal, which has been generally supportive of Musk's tenure at Twitter. But, the article makes it clear that Musk has totally failed to [...]

Copyright is still high on the list of censorial weapons. When you live in (or target) a country that protects free speech rights and offers intermediaries immunity via Section 230, you quickly surmise there's a soft target lying between the First Amendment and the CDA. That soft target is the DMCA. Thanks to plenty of [...]

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Let's start off with this point, which some seem to ignore when I talk about this stuff: I think many of the concerns" about disinformation are totally overblown. People act as if disinformation has a sort of bizarre mind-control over other people (never themselves) to the point that they act as if disinformation itself is [...]