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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 [...]

It has been known for years that polygraph tests can be beaten. This supposed thing of science can be manipulated to clear guilty people if guilty people know how to trick it. But law enforcement still likes polygraph tests because they can also be exploited in the other direction. When it's your word against the [...]

We've been writing about the problem of judge shopping" for years in a variety of contexts. While there used to be concerns about forum shopping," in which plaintiffs would seek out specific courts that were deemed more favorable (such as the Eastern District of Texas for patent troll cases), it got more ridiculous in recent [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. The free Microsoft Training Bundle is [...]

As Trump's favored performing monkey during his elected years, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani managed to set a lot of precedent. Sure, none of this precedent was set in court, but it's been all of NEVER since Americans have been blessed by the omnipresence of a TOP LAW GUY who has (1) leaked dark fluid [...]

We just got done noting how Dish Network's long-hyped 5G wireless network islikely doomed. While they're technically building a wireless network," the network's coverage, phone selection, and overall quality has provenlaughableso far, and there have been growing worries that Dish isrunning out of cash as it tries to meet regulatory deadlines for 5G deployment. Hoping [...]

It appears I slightly exaggerated the state of the Taco Tuesday trademark saga in my last post. After decades of ridiculous bullying coming from Taco John's concerning the trademark it somehow was granted on Taco Tuesday" - a term that is generic on its face, became more generic over time, and is also at least [...]

I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it's used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring [...]

While I can comprehend the fact that Donald Trump has access to money (even if it's unlikely he's playing with house money at this point), I cannot understand how he hasn't been reduced to a pro se litigant at this point. This man has a headful of bad legal ideas and somehow - despite his [...]

This keeps coming up in different contexts, so I thought I might write a short (ha, as if I can write short things!) blog post that I can point to on various occasions. I spend a lot of time here on Techdirt highlighting why your favorite solution to (*waves hands*) some big societal problem won't [...]

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Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don't cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations. These are long-held facts backed by years of court precedent, the most famous of which is the Supreme Court's 1969 Tinker decision. This is the baseline for school-student interactions when it [...]

Every six months or so the FCC announces it has taken some major new step to thwart annoying robocalls. Yet Americans still receive more than 4.5 billion such calls every month, the vast majority of FCC fines are never collected, scammers elude meaningful accountability, and the problem persists. Last week for example, the FCC announced [...]

There's nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren't as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In [...]

In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city's dated pay phones with information kiosks" providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by context-aware" ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC [...]

Cops really hate policing protests that target police. But that has been the reality since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ripped the bandage off an unhealed wound by placing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, choking the life out of him during an act that played out like an anthropomorphized [...]

There's an interesting thing that happens all too often in trademark cases, whereby people seem to flip the underlying argument. We see it in cases where someone opposes the registration of a certain trademark, and the party seeking the trademark complains that the government is trying to censor" them or limit their speech, when more [...]

There are no incentives in place to encourage accurate reporting of force deployment by law enforcement agencies. Tracking use of force means agencies are basically generating evidence for civil rights lawsuits. That's why force reporting is, at best, inconsistent. At its worst, it's simply dishonest. The lack of solid deterrents means agencies simply won't generate [...]

Well this is dumb. First off, let's just remind everyone that in a moment of pure stupidity, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff called for Section 230 to be abolished." Specifically, he claimed that websites must have standards and practices decided by law" and that websites need to be held accountable" for what users do [...]

Cable executives spent years denying that cord cutting" (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a fiction," or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies. Yeah, about that. Major cable companies continue [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple response to an attempt to defend Elon Musk's reinstatement of an account that posted CSAM, on the basis of the motivations for posting: I hate to tell you this, but legally speaking the intent doesn't matter - even if it was done [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, not long after the settlement in the Dancing Baby case, Universal was straight back to issuing DMCA takedowns, this time over a reporter's video of Prince fans singing Purple Rain (though it didn't take long for them to back down). Sony found itself in court after bullying a [...]

Mozilla's Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news abouta worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create [...]