Techdirt

While there’s a lot of talk about how getting privacy legislation right is hard (it is), or that doing it wrong could pose many problems (it could), that should never derail attention from the real reason the U.S. has no federal privacy law in 2023: Congress is blisteringly, comically corrupt. And with numerous, deep-pocketed industries […]

Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as […]

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Betweens Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision […]

“Evergreening” refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s monopoly control over it. The first Techdirt post about evergreening appeared almost exactly ten years ago. It concerned the rejection by the Indian […]

DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, […]

Curiosity Stream is the award-winning streaming and on-demand viewing destination where you can journey through our world and beyond. Its immersive experiences feature experts like David Attenborough, who will teach you about the natural world, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene, who will broaden your perspective on space, time, and the future with stunning visuals, and […]

For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety thinks that it’s easy: just do what I would do. The assumption is that there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable arguments […]

We’ve noted for years how, despite a lot of political lip service to “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. still doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. Despite spending $400 billion and counting, the FCC has done an abysmal job accurately mapping broadband speeds and availability, or holding monopolies responsible for false coverage […]

Huntsville, Alabama police officer William Darby was the only officer on the scene who felt a suicidal man needed to be murdered. And he was the last to arrive, uninvited, to a scene apparently under control, handled by two other officers who were doing an admirable job de-escalating the situation. Darby made his decision to […]

Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it’s ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.). But, error code 404 is (somewhat famously) the HTML code for “page not found.” In the early […]

Legacy media operations really, really want tech companies that send them traffic to pay them as well. From Rupert Murdoch’s link tax in Australia to the very bad JCPA in America, these requirements are nonsensical and run directly counter to the core functioning of the internet. Currently, one of the biggest pushes for such a […]

Elon Musk’s Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original “blue checks”—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be […]

Nothing kills cops like fentanyl. I mean, I don’t think it’s actually killed any cops yet, but any cop in the general vicinity of it acts like they’re dying and heads off the ER, surrounded by enablers, cop shop PR staff, and journalists willing to act as stenographers. To be sure, this opioid is killing […]

Unleash the power of PlayStation and explore hundreds of incredible games with a new choice of membership plan. With PlayStation Plus Essential, you’ll get to enjoy all the core PlayStation Plus benefits: join your friends in online multiplayer, add new games to your collection every month, get incredible deals from PlayStation Store, and more. Relive some […]

As you’ll recall, it became apparent pretty much immediately after Elon Musk took over Twitter that he had zero idea that the company was under an FTC consent decree that had just been renewed months earlier, and which had some fairly stringent rules regarding data privacy and how the company rolled out new features. Sometimes […]

Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened […]

Adidas is not exactly unknown in the seven circles of trademark insanity hell. The company most famously is a jealous defender of its vaunted “3 slanted stripes” branding. It takes that protective stance to ridiculous extremes, including going after an eSports league for having the “E” in question be three stripes, or suing to hell […]

In both Canada and the U.S., there’s no shortage of evidence that consolidation in telecom and media hasn’t been great for telecom and media — or employers, competition, or consumers. That’s not really stopping regulators in either country, who continue to approve massive harmful megadeals with only the pretense of meaningful review. Canada’s just approved […]

Earlier this year, a federal court dismissed almost all of a far right troll’s challenge to the criminal case brought against him by the DOJ. “Ricky Vaughn” is a notorious social media presence — one who’s been repeatedly suspended and banned for his never-ending string of shitheelishness. I don’t sympathize with Douglass Mackey, better known […]

Look, we all knew that there was going to be a lot of fuss about the upcoming public domaining (finally!) of Mickey Mouse nine months from now on January 1, 2024. I mean, we’ve already been talking about what next year’s public domain game jam is going to look like with Mickey as one of […]

Apple tried to create something useful and ended up empowering awful people. Meant to help its users keep an eye on things that were important to them, the small tracking devices known as AirTags were soon exploited by stalkers to track and harass their targets, leading to a class action lawsuit against the company by […]

Deepstash is a platform for finding and organizing the ideas that matter to you. It helps you become more inspired and productive through bite-sized ideas. In Deepstash, you find ideas on topics like personal development, art and culture, mindfulness, and more. These ideas are represented as little cards you can read at a glance. All […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the NY Post tweets a link to one of its own news stories, and Twitter decides that it violates the company’s rules (perhaps very questionably so), and in response, locks the NY Post’s Twitter account. Also, as part of the same “crackdown” on sharing certain media, Twitter […]

In case you’d missed it, the EU is currently proposing a telecom-industry backed plan to effectively tax Big Tech companies, and throw that money at Big Telecom companies for broadband expansion. On the surface, the proposal is part of the EU’s efforts to craft digital policies for the next few decades, with an eye on […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 bringing some facts to the conversation about the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter content moderation: Here is a research study (like, actual research) that provides nuance to the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter account deplatforming. Keep in mind that (as obvious […]

We’re nearing the end of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, and Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager. Today, […]

If you don’t use the 3CX VoIP platform, or work in the MSP space with companies that do, you may have missed the news that the company suffered a massive supply chain attack over the past few days. With comparisons being made to the SolarWinds fiasco, this was really, really bad. Unsuspecting clients of 3CX […]

If someone loses a patent lawsuit very badly—to the point where they face orders to pay attorneys’ fees—you wouldn’t think they would be eager to come back to court with a nearly identical lawsuit. But that’s what has happened with this month’s patent. What’s more, the lawyer representing the patent owner, William Ramey, has been […]

In recent years, major media organizations have been lobbying Congress to enact legislation, the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” requiring search engine providers to engage in a form of collective bargaining about the tax they would pay to media publishers for the privilege of providing links to their news articles, backed up by mandatory interest arbitration in which […]

We’ve already covered how Florida man Governor Ron DeSantis flipped out that Disney, the largest employer in his state, offered some mild criticism over one of his unconstitutional censorship bills, and decided to retaliate by (1) removing the stupid questionable “theme park exemption” his office had directly worked with Disney to insert into his unconstitutional […]

As a rule, it’s a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing […]

With its intuitive, immersive training method, Rosetta Stone will have you reading, writing, and speaking new languages like a natural in no time. You’ll start by matching words with images just like when you learned your native language as a child. Then you’ll move onto interactive lessons where speech recognition technology works to evaluate and […]

It’s been so weird the way Elon Musk and his friends have been jealous of underpaid, overworked journalists who happened to have blue check marks next to their name. There’s some sort of deep-seated insecurity to think that just because Twitter decided some people should be verified to avoid problems with impersonation that it was […]

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]

It’s opening day and already Major League Baseball has struck out. It’s a story as old as time: major sports league tries to trademark a bunch of city names only to be schooled on the internet and media by law professors and dropping the applications. Well, okay, so that’s not that common of a story, […]

It’s not as though we really need any more evidence that client-side scanning is a bad idea. Apple decided to be a pioneer and immediately discovered the world wasn’t exactly waiting for it to become a market leader in privacy invasion. We don’t need more information. We know breaking encryption results in broken encryption — […]

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to upgrade their networks. Quite often, […]

Earlier this month, we wrote about Mark Warner’s RESTRICT Act, mainly in the context of how it appeared to be kneejerk legislating in response to the moral panic around TikTok. Despite the bill being out for a few weeks, over the last few days, some of the discussion around it has gone viral, in particular […]

The Ultimate Advanced Cybersecurity Bundle has 5 courses to help you become a cybersecurity expert. You’ll learn how to architect, engineer, integrate, and implement secure solutions across complex environments to support a resilient enterprise while considering the impact of governance, risk, and compliance requirements. Courses will introduce you to the NIST Risk Management Framework, and […]

Officer Richard Gasparino of the Stamford, Connecticut police department couldn’t stand to have his “revenue diverted.” So, he arrested Michael Friend for the imaginary crime of holding up a sign warning motorists there was a sting operation in progress further up the road. The officer claimed Friend was “interfering with a police investigation” despite there […]

Dish Network remains a bit of a hot mess a month after a cyberattack effectively wiped the company off the face of the internet and disrupted most of the wireless and TV company’s internal systems. If you recall, it took the better part of a week before Dish even acknowledged to its users that anything […]

To be fair, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t always hand out immunity while waving away egregious, often horrific rights violations perpetrated by law enforcement officers. But it certainly seems to frequently find creative ways to let cops exit lawsuits, no matter how awful their behavior. Even the Supreme Court, which has done the […]

As you’ll recall, Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” but his definition of free speech… is not free speech supportive at all. It’s the opposite. Saying that free speech means “that which matches the law” means that when you have an oppressive, censorial government, they can suppress speech all you want, and […]

A couple of years ago, Utah became the first state in the union to mandate that content filters be enabled on all mobile devices sold by manufacturers like Samsung, Apple, Lenovo, or TCL. The measure was a hit among the anti-porn crowd because it created a precedent for other states which sought to curtail the […]

The life-plus-seventy-years sentence imposed on Winnie the Pooh by Cher’s ex-husband is finally over. Petitions for an early release went unheeded, forcing the butt naked childhood icon to perform tricks for the heirs of its creator’s estate until it was finally allowed to roam free — nearly 40 years after the bear’s sentence should have […]

I know we’re deep, deep, deep into the moral panic about social media being uniquely awful, especially for kids. It’s driving all sorts of nonsense, including the false idea that we’re in a uniquely excessive period of depression, or that it’s been “proven” that social media makes kids feel bad. But… that’s not what the […]

The All-In-One Hardcore Unity Game Developer Bundle has 8 courses to help you learn how to build your own games plus a 1 month pass for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Unity is one of the world’s most popular game engines. Used to easily create cross-platform 2D and 3D games, it comes with a powerful set […]

When the Adams County (OH) sheriff’s office raided rap artist Afroman’s home, he didn’t just sit back and assume everyone involved operated in good faith. The raid was captured on Afroman’s security cameras, which the artist soon converted into a viral video/rap song entitled “Will You Help Me Repair My Door.” The footage — which […]

The broadband and cable industry has long perfected the use of bullshit fees to jack up subscriber bills. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate — then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. They’ll then pretend they haven’t […]

Timing, as they say, is everything. We’ve been talking about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard a lot lately and for good reason. It’s a huge deal, both in terms of the size of the purchase relative to the video game industry, but also because of what it could mean for the overall competitive marketplace […]