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We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of keeping the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press, and accuse the highly popular and qualified candidate of everything from hating […]

Ever since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, there has been a lot of discussion about dismantling or defunding police departments. Some of this discussion occurred at the flashpoint. But it wasn’t limited to Minneapolis. Efforts to limit the damage caused by law enforcement by, say, farming out mental health calls to health care […]

Trademark bullying usually takes a pretty typical form. Someone with a trademark decides to interpret the need to enforce their mark in an extreme way and goes off threatening and/or suing everyone that even comes mildly close to using the registered trademark. It’s annoying, although perhaps mildly understandable if you squint your eyes just right. […]

I always find it vaguely amusing when the government realizes that the system of monopoly rights it created is used to restrain competition. The latest is over in the EU, where the European Commission has gone after pharmaceutical giant Teva, for abusing the patent system to limit competition for its multiple sclerosis medicine. Of course, […]

Lawsuits like these are filed all the time. Why? Because, just like out in the open world, opportunistic officers find it easy to coerce people into questioning and searches with the implication they’ll be delayed reaching their destination (or worse) if they don’t. And, like everywhere else in the US, many of these stops are […]

Last March, the FBI raided a storefront safety deposit box service owned by US Private Vaults. US Private Vaults is all about privacy. It offers customers something akin to end-to-end encryption for their physical goods. Very little customer information is retained and only customers have access to their possessions. The company does not carry a […]

This refurbished iPad 6th Gen features a full-sized 9.7″ tablet with a 2048×1536 LED-backlit Retina display, allowing you to surf the web, stream videos, or read files on a sharper, wider screen. It contains a dual-core 2.3 GHz Apple A10 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of flash memory storage, allowing the iPad to run […]

Early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the world was facing an “infodemic,” a mass outbreak of false and misleading information. While the WHO did not coin the term, it certainly made it popular, and contributed to the idea that it was the internet that was the leading cause of this […]

Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety. The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference with certain […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are similar and understandably frustrated anonymous replies to the claim that Section 230 predates content sorting and recommendation algorithms. Here’s first place: I’m old enough to remember using CompuServ and GEnie for online services, both of which had search functions that returned results, that guess what…. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, a proposed bill would have exempted Customs and Border Protection from FOIA compliance until reporting on the issue got the problem fixed, the DOJ was fighting against a FOIA lawsuit and arguing that not even the courts have any right to question the administration’s handling of records, and […]

For obvious reasons, we’ve covered a metric ton of Streisand Effect stories here at Techdirt over the years, but I honestly didn’t think we’d get to one about a judge not wearing pants. Yet, unfortunately, here we are. Meet Judge Jamie Jameson, of the 42nd Judicial Circuit court in Kentucky. Jameson is currently suspended from […]

Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news […]

The FBI has a long history of misconduct, dating back to the J. Edgar Hoover years when agents were writing letters to civil rights leaders encouraging them to kill themselves. Since then, investigations and leaks have exposed the FBI’s insular attitude that values incremental law enforcement wins over respect for enshrined rights. The addition of […]

Last week, we wrote about how publisher Wiley had removed 1,379 textbook titles from the list of books that academic libraries could lend out, thereby forcing students to have to buy the textbooks, rather than take them out of the library. As we noted, this was an example of how damaging copyright has been on […]

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the […]

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing IT fields. The A-Z Cybersecurity Developer Bundle contains 10 courses that cover everything from ethical hacking to penetration testing to securing networks, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps […]

You may recall that a year ago, pretend libertarian, John Stossel, who talks a big game about free speech and the “marketplace of ideas,” decided to sue Meta/Facebook and some of its fact checking partners for, oh right, daring to fact check him in a way he didn’t like. For this job, he hired the […]

We’ve noted for years how “Big Telecom” is desperate to have “Big Tech” pay them billions of dollars for no coherent reason. This effort is what began the net neutrality wars, and, despite the fact it’s routinely dressed up as adult policy making, it’s little more than a lobbyist-fueled cash grab. The effort always starts […]

There is something about when corporate brands get used in political advertisements that seems to make everybody forget about the very concept of fair use or international equivalents. One previous example would be when a bunch of foodstuff brands claimed trademark infringement over an anti-littering campaign in Canada, arguing that the use of their own […]

Within every conversation about technology lies the moral question: is a technology good or bad? Or, is it neutral? In other words, are our values part of the technologies we create or is technology valueless until someone decides what to do? This is the kind of dilemma Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company, found itself in […]

Last summer, a blockbuster leak of data allegedly related to NSO Group’s customers made it crystal clear that earlier rumors about routine abusive use of powerful phone-targeting malware were likely true. Israel’s NSO Group swiftly issued a denial that was more angry than coherent and did nothing to persuade its many critics that NSO just […]

Normally, this wouldn’t be surprising, and normally, this wouldn’t even require a blog post, but because nothing in the 5th Circuit makes sense these days, it is a little surprising and it is worth a post to note that despite the insanity of Judge Andy Oldham’s ruling putting Texas’ content moderation law back on the […]

Everyone thinks America’s favorite pastime is baseball. In reality, it’s mindless mergers and acquisitions that promise boundless new “synergies,” then deliver a parade of harmful consolidation, job cuts, closures, chaos, and competitive harms, all buried under a giant mountain of bullshit. If you recall, AT&T’s massive $200 billion acquisition of DirecTV and Time Warner wound […]

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It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… in that politicians who couldn’t pass their terrible and destructive bills through normal means are trying to light up various must pass funding and omnibus end-of-year bills with those failed bills as amendments. It happens every year like clockwork, and I’m sure we’ll be noting some other […]

There’s a routine assumption that U.S. partisan division is something that’s just inherent in the American DNA. In reality, the nation’s divisions are routinely and intentionally cultivated and encouraged by powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations to stall consensus and reform. Both parties are culpable, though it’s the GOP that has perfected the tactic as […]

Buckle in, because there are essentially two ways to write this post but both of them start off the same way. Regular readers here will be familiar with Nintendo’s now years-long war on emulation. The whole thing is ultimately quite stupid, because there is no indication that emulator and ROM sites ever really had a […]

You may recall that, back in 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the US federal judiciary and how it charges for PACER. If you don’t know, PACER is the court system’s electronic filing/records system, that allows users to access documents in federal court. It looks and acts like it was designed in the 1990s, and […]

One of the oldest and most important topics on Techdirt is copyright, and the many problems with the law both here and abroad. One of the best voices on the subject, here and in many other publications, is Glyn Moody, who recently released his book Walled Culture, that goes through the history of how legacy […]

We’ve written a bunch about how Ed Sheeran recognizes how batshit crazy current copyright law is. One of the most successful recording artists today, you’d think that maybe he’d be a copyright maximalist, and yet copyright just seems to keep getting in the way of his creativity. Sheeran has admitted that piracy made him successful. […]

The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone […]

GameGuru is a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an easy, enjoyable and comprehensive game creation process that is designed specifically for those who are not programmers or designers/artists. It allows you to build your own game world with easy to use tools. Populate your game by placing down characters, weapons, and other game items, […]

Back in March, we noted that the EU and US had announced that they had come to an agreement on transatlantic data flows. This is actually a really big and important story that gets almost no attention, because “transatlantic data flows” sounds boring. However, it’s really, really big and matters for the future of a […]

It will never stop being bizarre to me that a social media app tried to claim ownership of VR, AR, and effectively every next-gen, Internet-related technology under the “Metaverse” brand… and the entirety of the tech press just simply… went along with it. As a result, we’ve spent the better part of the last few […]

It seems that trademark shenanigans are becoming something of a corporate tradition for the folks over at Oatly. The Swedish oat-milk maker, backed by several celebrities, last made it onto our pages first for suing another oat-milk producer essentially for having the word “oat” in its brand name… and then for losing that lawsuit because […]

We’ve been writing about journalist Jason Leopold for many years, either focused on his FOIA adventures or the amazing (and important) scoops he achieves through them. If you look back through our archives, you’ll see that Leopold knows how to use freedom of information laws basically better than anyone, and thus wields them effectively to […]

The Uvalde (Texas) PD’s response to a school shooting was to show up and then do nothing for more than an hour. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from multiple agencies hung back as a gunman terrorized a classroom full of elementary school students, ultimately killing 19 kids and two teachers. The officers at the scene […]

At this point, it seems exceptionally likely that Elon Musk will own Twitter within a few weeks. Because nothing is predictable in this saga, you never know, but the odds are that by Halloween Twitter will be Muskville. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about what that means, but in our post about Musk’s […]

People come up with some really strange stuff to do when they have a modicum of power and apparently no idea how to utilize it responsibly. Such is the case at Northeastern University, a research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. A few days ago, students and faculty noticed a new addition to their desks: motion […]

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Over the years, we’ve posted so many different stories about questionable decisions by PayPal to cut off services from users it objected to, or even seizing the money in their account that it’s impossible to dig up all of those stories. But, by now, we’ve seen well over a decade of PayPal acting as some […]

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 […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about publishers claiming that their lawsuit against the Internet Archive won’t impact any of its services beyond the Open Library: About as believable as Putin’s claim tat 96% of those polled wanted to become Russians. In second place, it’s a lengthy […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, ISPs were ignoring the death of “six strikes” and still threatening to disconnect accused pirates, and also taking their third shot at getting the Supreme Court to kill net neutrality, while broadband lobbyists were gushing over the re-appointment of Ajit Pai, who was himself busy blasting Apple for […]

If you’ve ever tried to build a “smart home” you’ve probably run face first into no shortage of problems. Gear is expensive, overly complicated, and more often than not different devices don’t play well together. It’s a sector filled with various walled gardens by gatekeepers looking to lock you into one ecosystem, placing the onus […]

Every unhappy populace is unhappy in its own way, but every autocratic regime is the same. Vietnam may have embraced a form of capitalism that made it inviting to foreigners, but the government’s embrace has always been a bit on the strangulation side. Sure, Vietnam citizens may have more opportunities for earning money than running […]

Why won’t this tattoo copyright thing die? We’ve talked about several instances over the past few years involving someone famous having their likeness faithfully reproduced, in an authorized fashion, in video game media. Take-Two has been involved in more than one of these disputes, which tend to amount to a tattoo artist or company claiming […]

These days, the conspiracy-minded GOP candidates (who seem to be an increasing majority of the party right now) seem to believe that there needs to be a conspiracy against them or they’re just not that important. It can be the deep state, big tech, or the “woke banks” or whatever, but someone must be coming […]

The FBI has always played it fast and loose with FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) requirements. It tries to get away with it by shifting its self-perception as needed. When asked why it’s bypassing limitations on backdoor searches, it will plead ignorance, gesturing with its massive hairy hands thoughtfully and saying it’s nothing more than […]