Techdirt

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 [...]

The state of Texas was sued in a federal district court by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, and a slate of other companies including subsidiaries of Canadian firm MindGeek (owner of Pornhub). Other plaintiffs include the parent companies of popular adult sites like XVideos and Bang Bros, and [...]

Ah, copyright. Eric Goldman alerts us to to a new bit of copyright nonsense. Jieun Kiaer, an Oxford professor of Korean linguistics, recently published an academic book called Emoji Speak: Communications and Behaviours on Social Media. As you can tell from the name, it's a book about emoji, and about how people communicate with them: [...]

Donald Trump can't win consecutive elections. And he certainly can't win lawsuits. Pretty much every bit of litigation Trump has engaged in since he was elected president has been tossed out on its proverbial ear, the completely expected outcome for lawsuits engaged in angrily, but not coherently. About a year ago, Trump's legal team issued [...]

A few weeks ago, the Progress Action Fund released a political ad in Ohio that went somewhat viral on social media. I saw one person refer to it as the most effective political ad" they'd ever seen. And, I mean, even if you don't agree with the message, you have to admit that (1) it [...]

Originally developed for the software industry, Agile is the project management methodology that leverages quick, iterative sessions to rapidly identify defects and improve a product. Now that more companies are going digital, Agile is seeing even more popularity in the working world. The Agile Expert Project Management Bundle will get you up to speed with [...]

Lots of discussion about Wikipedia's public utility has occurred since its inception. On one hand, it's true: just about anyone can make edits to the information, unlike physical encyclopedias or websites owned by the former purveyors of these informative hardbound reams of paper. On the other hand, the editing process is not some Wild West. [...]

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies. That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every [...]

And here we go again. we've been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period [...]

Over the last few years, as we've seen state legislatures and governors focusing on culture war legislating, rather than sensible policy legislating, one thing that's become popular - kicked off by Texas's anti-abortion law, but gladly embraced by Democrats as well - is the idea of trying to avoid judicial scrutiny by taking enforcement out [...]

As information started to leak out from the... everywhere about NSO Group's secondhand contribution to surveillance abuses all over the world, the world (except for the worst of NSO's customers) began taking action. Even the government that facilitated many of NSO's sales to human rights violators decided it might be time to toss a few [...]

The lawsuits against Elon Musk's ex-Twitter continue to pile up, but here's one where the law itself is ridiculous and unjust. As you'll recall, the EU Copyright Directive included a link or snippet tax for news (which they call a neighboring right") similar to the link taxes we've discussed in Australia and Canada. The main [...]