We live in strange times. It used to be that you could set your watch to one simple thing: any time any government agency or policymaker had any question about whether or not we needed to expand copyright laws, Hollywood would answer with a resounding “YES, ABSOLUTELY!” Over the years, copyright has expanded massively, and […]
The First Amendment provides broad protections for journalists, not only as to what they publish, but also how they collect information. For instance, publishing leaked government documents is protected, even if the acts that provided journalists with these documents may be subject to criminal proceedings. In recent months, however, a couple of law enforcement agencies […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class you’ll […]
While I often disagree with Tim Wu, I like and respect him, and always find it interesting to know what he has to say. Wu was also one of the earliest folks to give me feedback on my Protocols not Platforms paper, when he attended a roundtable at Columbia University discussing early drafts of the […]
We just got done noting how pretty much all of the criticism of the Sprint T-Mobile merger by economists and consumer advocates wound up being true. The deal has resulted in more than 10,000+ eliminated jobs, steady price hikes, annoying new fees, a weaker T-Mobile brand, and a lower quality product overall. It also clearly […]
It truly is amazing that the video game industry is so heavily divided on the topic of user-made game mods. I truly don’t understand it. My take has always been very simple: mods are good for gamers and even better for game makers. Why? Simple, mods serve to extend the useful life of video games […]
A few weeks ago we had a story from Glyn Moody about how some people were effectively spamming music streaming services like Spotify with “functional music,” tracks designed to get plays solely for the sake of royalties. Glyn, reasonably, called for an “overhaul,” in how these systems worked. And apparently some people were thinking similarly? […]
In the latest chapter of my laziness writing on the crazy escapades of anti-porn Republicans for Techdirt, I wish to introduce you to Ohio state Rep. Steve Demetriou, who represents Bainbridge Township. Rep. Demetriou introduced the Innocence Act, or House Bill (HB) 295, on October 11, 2023. I wrote about the bill over at AVN.com and […]
This week, our top comments on the insightful side both come in response to Elon Musk’s plans to turn X into a financial app, and the question of whether you’d trust him with your money. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment: Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we wrote about a session of our election simulation game, Machine Learning President, that we played in Chicago. The EFF sued cops in California for refusing to hand over stingray documents, a Florida appeals court said handing over passwords is protected by the fifth amendment, and Senator Wyden […]
This is not a fun case. It’s instructional, but it involves some pretty noxious criminal behavior. And that’s how these things work, usually. People who aren’t facing criminal charges rarely need to challenge warrants. They never need to challenge the evidence used against them because, well, no one’s using any evidence against them. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) […]
After being discussed for years and years, the Online Safety Act in the UK is now law, after receiving “royal assent” last week. Hilariously, the UK’s announcement declared that children and adults will now be safer online, as if that’s absolutely true. It’s not, though. The law includes many provisions that will make both children […]
These days everyone seems to be talking about AI, and the Copyright Office is no exception, although it may make sense for it to speak here because people keep trying to invoke copyright as a concept implicated by various aspects of AI, including, and perhaps especially, with regard to “training” AI systems. So the Copyright […]
The EU is currently updating eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services), an EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. That’s clearly a crucial piece of legislation in the digital age, and updating it is sensible given the fast pace of development in the sector. But […]
The Chinese government has spent years placing its hands around the collective neck of its Uighur minority. For some reason, the massive government fears a small minority of Muslims and has subjected it to constant surveillance and outright oppression. The Chinese government has been assisted in these efforts by Huawei, a tech company that realizes […]
The Complete Big Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn about big data. You’ll start with an introduction to Python and move on to learn about Hadoop, Seaborn, Plotly, Pandas, and more. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of […]
Somehow I missed this (and I’m surprised it didn’t get much attention) but last month was the 25th anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) being signed into law. I only spotted it because The Register just had an article looking back at 25 years of the DMCA. Given how central to various internet […]
We’ve well established that the AT&T–>Time Warner–> Warner Brothers Discovery mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived, resulting in more than 50,000 layoffs, the death of popular properties like Mad Magazine, and an overall erosion of brands like HBO and CNN. Very much on brand, HBO’s CEO and chairman Casey Bloys […]
Cord-cutting, referred to as some sort of myth for many years, is now an obvious trend. And as I have personally claimed for years now, the last thread that is keeping the cable business in a state that’s anything remotely like its heyday is live sports broadcasts. In the past several years, however, more and […]
Over the past few weeks of our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the rise of the commercialized internet, and how it enabled transactions online, leading to the original dot com bubble around e-commerce. But, as we noted, nearly all of that was based on using the internet as […]
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