When your rap track diss battle ends in whiny proto-SLAPP suits, I’m going to suggest you’ve officially lost. If you ever want to see this dril tweet as a legal filing (two actually), I think it’s in Drake’s semi-SLAPPy demands for discovery and depositions from Universal Music, Spotify, and iHeartRadio for having the temerity to… […]
After literally decades of rumor and speculation, fading satellite TV companies Dish and DirecTV finally recently announced they had proposed a pointless merger in a last gasp for relevance. Once blocked by regulatory worries about competitive impact, executives at both companies had long dreamed of combining the two companies into one, still broadly unremarkable company. […]
It’s been over a year since we last talked about the trademark dispute between Katy Perry, the American pop star, and Katie Perry, an Australian woman with a fashion line. To bring you up to speed, and I’ll use first names here to keep the confusion at a minimum, Katy sold merchandise for her 2014 […]
I come here not to bury this Wired article, nor to damn it with faint praise. I come to critique it, while realizing the framing and (especially!) the headline may not be the direct responsibility of its author, Paresh Dave. Privacy laws are hit and miss in the United States. Mostly miss. There’s not a […]
Support us on Patreon » Last week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users, our new card game where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. As is tradition when we launch a new game, myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin joined Mike on an episode of the […]
Way back in the day (1971, to be precise), the Supreme Court created a cause of action to sue federal officers over rights violations. The original case, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, involved Webster Bivens and the warrantless search of his Brooklyn home by FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics — the precursor to the […]
The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You’ll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It’s on sale […]
Last week we launched the Kickstarter for our amazing new card game, One Billion Users. It’s a fast, fun card game where players try to build up the biggest and best social media network, while simultaneously trying to undermine the networks the other players are trying to build. In the campaign, we mentioned a couple […]
We’ve noted more than once that the 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies to the states. A lot of that money will be thrown in the lap of incumbents with long histories of empty promises, but a lot of it will be leveraged for genuine, major improvements in broadband […]
There isn’t a ton of new information here to get into, but we might as well close the loop on this episode. Way back during the 2020 Presidential campaign, then-President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign put out an admittedly humorous animated video showing a massive Trump train barreling down the tracks, only to have Joe Biden […]
Making the bold assumption their voting bloc could read, Louisiana legislators passed a law earlier this year that mandates the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Building on the inexplicable support of people who would find Trump’s actions and statements reprehensible if they were carried out by anyone else, legislators are […]
Whether you like the results or not, there’s no denying that the EU’s GDPR legislation has tackled a wide range of privacy problems in the online world. Other countries around the globe — including the US — may lack comparable national legislation but there are alternative ways of protecting people’s privacy, as a recent ruling […]
You can’t trust cops around your personal info, data, communications, or pretty much anything. Officers have a lot of power and access to plenty of databases filled with personal info. They abuse this power and access frequently. Here’s some (recent) historical perspective. In July 2024, a female police officer was awarded a $1 million settlement […]
Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking […]
What stupid times we live in. President-elect Donald Trump has ordered Republicans to kill a widely-supported bipartisan journalism shield law that would protect press freedom and whistleblowers. Many people voted for Donald Trump on the false belief that he would “protect free speech.” But in reality, nearly every instinct he has is to stifle free […]
Look: I think it was nice for a change that the Biden administration at least paid some passing but inconsistent lip service to antitrust reform. It was a lovely change of pace from decades of feckless careerists who pay empty lip service to market innovation while rubber stamping mindless consolidation at every turn. And a […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Elon Musk’s hypocrisy on the subject of boycotts: Advertisers fleeing Twitter aren’t even boycotting it. They’re just each making their own decisions for themselves. A boycott is a group action in the group’s longer-term interest, even if it is against […]
This week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. We’ve put a lot of work into designing a fun, fast-paced game and we need your help to produce it — so if you want to try your […]
It’s amazing just how many of the trademark disputes we see and discuss here at Techdirt ultimately result from the USPTO granting trademarks that never should have been granted in the first place. In the food industry specifically, we saw this recently in the whole “Taco Tuesday” episode, in which the Trademark Office granted Taco […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online […]
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