Techdirt

Back in the fall we were among the first to highlight that Elon Musk might face a pretty big FTC problem. Twitter, of course, is under a 20 year FTC consent decree over some of its privacy failings. And, less than a year ago (while still under old management), Twitter was hit with a $150 […]

The relentless push to make every last feature in every tech device you own part of a subscription service shows no sign of slowing down. Fitness companies like Fitbit have increasingly shoveled basic health monitoring features into their subscription plan. Companies like BMW have increasingly tried to make basic concepts like heated seats a subscription-only […]

On Monday, I saw Elon Musk tweet the following, and initially thought that he might have actually made a good policy decision for once, and planned to write up something about Elon doing something right (contrary to the opinion of some, I’m happy to give him credit when it’s due): Punching back against DMCA abusers […]

Telecom and media giants (News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, mostly) have spent big bucks to scuttle the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. That’s involved seeding all kinds of bullshit claims in the press (with the GOP’s help) about how Sohn hates rural America, police, puppies, and freedom. Some of the most recent attacks […]

Last week, we announced the winners of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We strongly encourage everyone to go check out all the submissions, but as in past years, I sat down with Mike and our game design partner Randy Lubin for an episode of the podcast all about the […]

Bear with me here, because this is going to take some explaining as a matter of throat-clearing for this post, which is actually the entire problem. Back in 2021, several film studios filed a lawsuit against ISP RCN, accusing it of ignoring piracy conducted by its customers. That suit mostly followed the same bullshit playbook […]

The DMCA lends itself to abuse. The intent of the law was to limit copyright infringement on services hosting user-generated content by providing safe harbors for service providers who made good faith efforts to respond to DMCA complaints. In practice, the law has forced providers to side with complainants and do very little in the […]

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Even as Elon first made his bid for Twitter, we highlighted just how little he understood about content moderation and trust & safety. And, that really matters, because, as Nilay Patel pointed out, managing trust & safety basically is the core business of a social media company: “The essential truth of every social network is […]

Big Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to force Big Tech to pay them billions in additional subsidies for no coherent reason. We’ve noted for several years how the push is self-serving bullshit by anti-competitive telecom giants, yet thanks to their lobbying influence, the effort shows no sign […]

We’ve long known so-called “predictive policing” is garbage. It’s the same old biased policing, except shinier and more expensive. Every system in place relies on data generated by policework — data instantly tainted by the things cops do, like hassling minorities, engaging in very selective enforcement, and treating people as inherently suspicious just because of […]

Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to […]

The automotive industry is entering into its own subprime crisis. Even before the COVID pandemic led to supply chain issues that vastly inflated car prices, lenders were starting to extend loan periods to make things easier for underfunded purchasers, moving on from the industry standard 3-5 year loans to 84-month baselines that ensure people could […]

Over the last few years, we’ve written a number of stories about a (somewhat silly) trademark dispute between Jack Daniels, makers of whiskey, and VIP Products, makers of doggy chew toys, including one for “Bad Spaniels” that is a pretty clear parody of Jack Daniels. When we had last mentioned the case it was in […]

We’ve known for a while that the Fifth Circuit is staunchly pro-cop. But, in recent months, it’s also shown itself to be no friend of the First Amendment. In September, it suddenly decided the First Amendment doesn’t have anything to do with online speech. It refused to block a Texas law targeting social media services […]

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I know, I know, there are no room for facts in the modern GOP, just feelings. But, still, it’s kind of remarkable just how much they seem committed to the bit that Twitter was actively trying to suppress Republicans to help Joe Biden. There remains zero proof of this. Zero. Over the course of the […]

For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a lengthy, structured response to a complaint about our coverage of Twitter: “Trolling!? You must mean like gossiping about one minute service outages, and leading the readers to infer that the collapse of Twitter is imminent.” A quick search for “twitter outage” […]

On Tuesday, we announced the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. Now, as in past years, we’ll be spending the next few weeks taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). First up, it’s the winner of the […]

A lawsuit filed over exploitation of content moderators will be allowed to continue, according to a recent ruling by a Kenyan court. Former employees of Meta sued the company in the Kenya Employment and Labour Relations Court last year, alleging being subjected to a “toxic work environment” while performing the often unpleasant task for removing […]

As we’re right at the 1 year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, regular readers here will have followed along with all kinds of posts we’ve done on the subject, be it on tech-related items or some of the ways the video game industry has organized to help the country get […]

This isn’t about Bob Murray. I mean, it sure seems like it is. It involves a baseless defamation lawsuit against journalists, a West Virginia coal company CEO, and court losses for a litigious coal boss. This isn’t about “Eat Shit” Bob Murray, the head of (the now-bankrupted) Murray Energy who sued John Oliver for saying […]

I keep hearing people pretend that the GOP in general, and Florida GOPers more specifically, and Governor Ron DeSantis most specifically, are fighting for “free speech,” when they continually seem to push blatantly unconstitutional legislation designed to attack free speech and the 1st Amendment in a way that keeps getting Florida shot down in court […]

Facial recognition tech needs more work. It’s not great. Even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad. While it performs well when identifying people not often considered to be criminal suspects (middle-aged white men), it’s far less accurate when identifying everyone else (minorities, women). Cops don’t often see what the problem is. Their job usually […]

The Complete Award-Winning Luminar AI Bundle comes with the photo editing software, 3 template packs, and a photography ecourse. Luminar AI is an intelligent photo editor with an intuitive workflow and one-click solutions for complex tasks. With more than 100 tools powered by artificial intelligence, Luminar AI helps you make complex edits fast. Retouch portraits and create […]

Well, this will be fun. As you’ll recall, in 2021, Texas signed into law a bill that effectively banned the right of companies to moderate content on social media. That law has been challenged in court, and while a district court tossed it out as unconstitutional (and obviously so), the 5th Circuit reversed in a […]

Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company’s employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they’d experienced an […]

This will be a quick one, but we now have a name and confirmation of a detail from a previous post. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how an unreleased game from developer Fntastic, The Day Before, was both having its release date pushed back and dealing with takedowns of a bunch of footage […]

Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, […]

One of the (many) villains in “Walled Culture” the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to ebooks. What could have been one of the most important expansions of the power and possibility of the book form became instead its opposite – a diminishment […]

The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers. Former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is still […]

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On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic. In response, Twitter spent a few years hiring some fantastic engineers and building up a […]

Back in January, we noted that T-Mobile had recently revealed it had been hacked eight times over the last five years. But a new report by security expert Brian Krebs suggests it could be far worse than that. According to Krebs, hackers are making a compelling case that they’ve managed to compromise the wireless giant’s […]

What amazing timing! Merely a few weeks back we were discussing the major regulatory hurdles the United States, the EU, and the UK were putting in front of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68 billion. Agencies from all three governing bodies, while differing on some specifics, generally had the same concerns: lessening the […]

Between Sydney “tried to break up my marriage” and “blew my mind because of her personality,” we have had a lot of journalists anthropomorphizing AI chatbots lately. TIME’s cover story decided to go even further and argued: “If future AIs gain the ability to rapidly improve themselves without human guidance or intervention, they could potentially wipe […]

After all these years, the Supreme Court is finally weighing in on Section 230 in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases, and the outcome could have a very significant impact. Our organization, the Copia Institute, filed an amicus brief in the case, as did many other parties. This week, we’re joined by Jess Miers from the […]

It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years. And, […]

For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges. This is more of […]

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Last week I wrote some initial thoughts on the Supreme Court hearing in Gonzalez v. Google. Of course, as lots of people mentioned, it was tied at the hip with another case, Taamneh v. Twitter, as both were granted cert together. The two cases have been connected for a while, as the decisions in the […]

The Biden administration has given all federal agencies 30 days to ensure staffers do not have TikTok on any federal devices. All agency vendors are to adhere to the same rules within 90 days. It’s the latest evolution in a growing planetary moral panic that’s gotten well out ahead of its skis, resulting in often-performative solutions that […]

Legislating from the bench is always problematic. People who like what courts have decided will claim this was the right thing to do. People who don’t like the decision will claim this is an overstep. Whatever the case in Virginia, this is good news. Legislation from the bench happened. But it didn’t turn into actual […]

You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, […]

In January, we asked designers to create games based on works that entered the public domain this year for our fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! It took us a little while to get through all the entries, but now it’s time to announce the winners, and it was not an […]

What if we told you the Stupid Patent of the Month has a sponsor, but we don’t know who it is? That would seem shady, wouldn’t it? This month’s stupid patent, U.S. Patent No. 9,986,435, was brought to you—to all of us, really—from the murky depths of the litigation finance industry. Originally assigned to a shell […]

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Big data has always been big business but, in recent years, it’s also become big government business. The stuff advertisers like is also stuff the government likes. Millions of tax dollars have been fed to private companies offering government agencies a wealth of information they’ve never had access to before. Everyone carries a computer in […]

Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to proclaim himself a defender of free speech, but time and time again he’s looked to stifle, suppress, and silence speech. He’s done it with his social media bill that limits the 1st Amendment rights of social media sites, with his Stop WOKE Act which literally bars speech, and with […]