Court transparency and equitable access to court documents are ongoing struggles. The federal court system’s malicious compliance with congressional directives has given us exorbitant fees and a clunky, counterintuitive platform for online access to court documents. Part of the federal court system doesn’t even give us that much. Despite being subject to a 2016 law […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes from Violet Aubergine in response to the accusation that coverage of Elon Musk is motivated by hatred: We don’t hate Musk. We would love it if Musk was diligently working at making Twitter better via methods that don’t mimic a coked up grizzly bear. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we took a look at how we got to the point where Hollywood is trying to attack the internet via NAFTA. In a case with echoes of those about to go before the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit shut down a “terrorists used Twitter” lawsuit. Congress was pressuring […]
Thanks to drug legalization, there’s a new “drug corridor” that Kansas law enforcement is taking advantage of. Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use in 2012. Ever since then, state troopers have camped out on I-70 to stop people heading to or from the weed-friendly state. It’s weird to call a road leading to a state with […]
We’ve had no shortage of posts at Techdirt on the problems of fraud and abuse in the current DMCA takedown process. The reason for that is pretty obvious: the whole thing is so wide open to this kind of abuse that it’s actually sort of a wonder that it doesn’t suffer from it even more […]
Lots of people have really strange ideas about what defamation entails. Far too many people believe defamation occurs anytime their feelings are hurt or they aren’t portrayed in the best light possible. These people are wrong. Often, those in wrong choose to represent themselves when they desire to be out-tilted by windmills. Sometimes, they retain […]
Next week, the Supreme Court will hold the oral arguments in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases. Gonzalez is the main show (and I’m somewhat surprised they didn’t have the hearings on the same day). There were dozens upon dozens of amicus briefs filed in the case, including one by us. There have been lots of […]
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The city of Green Bay, Wisconsin feels no private conversation in city hall should go unheard. The city feels there’s nothing wrong with installing overhead mics to snoop on citizens who might be congregating in the hall’s halls. “I think it’s pretty customary to have the kind of surveillance systems that we have here,” Green […]
The good news: last December New York State finally passed a landmark “right to repair” bill providing American consumers some additional protection from repair monopolies. The bad news: before the bill was passed, corporate lobbyists worked with New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to covertly water the bill down almost to the point of meaninglessness. […]
We’ve dealt with a great many silly trademark disputes in the video game industry over the years, but this one is a special kind of stupid. Fntastic, the studio behind the forthcoming The Day Before horror game, has released a couple statements lately regarding an apparent ongoing trademark dispute. The first announcement confirmed that the […]
In 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling “unlimited” wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits. The lawsuit noted that, starting in 2011, AT&T began selling “unlimited” plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out […]
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), like nearly every government agency, doesn’t care much for FOIA requests or requesters. It generally takes a lawsuit to force the agency to comply with its FOIA obligations. And its day-to-day handling of FOIA requests is so uninspired, it couldn’t even come up with a reason to deny Mike […]
We just recently wrote about the reasons why Congress should move, right now, to codify the NYT v. Sullivan case into law. While considered mostly settled and uncontroversial, in the last few years there have been increasing attacks on this ruling, which has been one of the most important rulings in preserving and protecting free […]
X-Mirage turns your Mac into an AirPlay receiver for mirroring whatever on your iPhone, iPad or iPod screen – apps, games, photos, videos, presentations, websites, and more to the bigger screen. With real-time mirroring and media control, X-Mirage gives you the best gaming, content viewing, and browsing experience. Taking airplay to the next level, this […]
Bad people selling terrible things to even worse people has been around since long before the debut of smartphones. But now it’s just so much easier to bring these two parties together to inflict misery on others. What’s considered to be just a good investigative tool when wielded by government agencies (looking at you, NSO […]
As more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies begin to flow, entrenched U.S. broadband providers are working overtime to try and secure their share of it by any means necessary. That has included sabotaging grant applications from competitors, changing state laws to dictate who can or can’t get these subsidies, and falsely inflating their actual […]
Perhaps it’s a result of spending many years now writing about intellectual property matters, but it is still shocking just how little understanding there is for how fair use works in conjunction with copyright law. It’s especially irritating when the folks who don’t understand it come from the government itself. Which brings us to the […]
A few months ago at a conference, I was somewhat surprised to hear from an academic whose views on antitrust are closely aligned with FTC chair Lina Khan complain to me that Khan appeared to be a disaster as an FTC Commissioner, noting that multiple FTC staffers had been complaining or heading for the exits. […]
“Innocent until proven guilty” is the standard we claim to respect here in the United States. In reality, it’s anything but. Arrested people have their faces splashed across news sites and mug shot aggregators, presented as nothing more than a face and a list of charges. Accused criminals are almost always discussed without the “accused” […]
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