Roughly a year ago, we discussed one of a few instances of a company filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against its own employees as a retaliation tactic for those employees forming a union. In this specific case, it was the company behind Medieval Times, an organization that builds fake castles and sells food and drink […]
Adding to the case law of small, but significant, Fourth Amendment law is this decision [PDF] handed down by a Maine federal court. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) The Fourth Amendment makes things pretty clear: to perform invasive searches, cops need warrants. But over the years since the erection of that standard, we’ve seen it loosened. A host […]
To hear Texas legislators (and the 5th Circuit) view the world, it is apparently wholly unconstitutional to share information from the government with websites in any manner that might pressure them in how they moderate, yet at the same time, the government is absolutely free to compel companies to post messages that they want on […]
Dominating a field is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it gives you extensive reach, immensely profitable products, and — if you’re just too good at it — the horrific realization your brand name has been commodified to the point that hundreds of millions of people now use your proper noun as a verb. (It […]
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At this point, any Senator signing on to support KOSA cannot deny that the bill has been written explicitly to suppress LGBTQ+ voices. The Heritage Foundation said so directly earlier this year. And Senator Marsha Blackburn flat out said that KOSA was important in order to “protect minor children from the transgender [sic] in our […]
We’ve noted a few times now how as the streaming sector consolidates and grows, it’s becoming more and more like the traditional cable industry it disrupted. This enshittification includes a lot of endless price hikes, a steady degradation of product quality, pointless mergers that cause endless layoffs, and the implementation of new restrictive efforts to […]
ShotSpotter has long presented itself as a reliable detector of gunshots. Mileage, however, has varied. Law enforcement customers that have gotten disgruntled with this limited service have pointed out — en route to terminated contracts — that (a) detected gunshots are not always gunshots, (b) detected gunshots are rarely useful intel, and (c) detecting gunshots […]
The fallout from game engine Unity’s decision to try to cram a completely new and different pricing structure down the throats of game developers continues. Originally announced in mid-September, Unity took a bunch of its tiered structures of its offerings and suddenly instituted per-install fees, along with a bunch of other fee structures and requirements […]
We’ve written a bunch of stuff about the obvious to anyone who understands the internet problems of Canada’s C-18, now dubbed the Online News Act. The fundamental premise behind it is to break the open internet, as an obviously corrupt forced wealth transfer from one disfavored industry to an industry that helps get politicians elected. […]
When it comes to the children, Wu-Tang Europol is for the children. According to a recent report by Balkan Insight, Europol (Interpol but without the across-the-pond component), the only thing that should matter is the kids. Europeans’ rights and privacy should be sidelined — possibly forever! — until European law enforcement can put a dent […]
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As you’ve likely heard, earlier this week the WGA worked out a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new contract that ended their months-long strike. By all accounts, this looks like a big win for the WGA, which is fantastic and long overdue. The AMPTP seemed to […]
A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It’s the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies. NYC […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy deploying an overused (and often abused) quote for, in this case, a very apt purpose — responding to right wing denial about Republicans pushing to censor the internet: Sure all the evidence shows it’s republicans censoring things but… “The Party told […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a district court ignored the real issues when it dismissed the EFF’s constitutional challenge to FOSTA, while we looked at how the law was becoming another tool for silencing people you dislike, legislators were pushing for even more draconian laws under the guise of fighting sex trafficking, and […]
You can be a law enforcement officer without being a complete asshole. I know it rarely seems to be the case, but it’s completely possible to command respect while still treating others with respect. And while assholery tends to go hand-in-hand with enforcing the law far too often, the end result of being vindictive and […]
As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-processing charges” to a publisher. “Green” OA papers are available because the authors self-archive their work on a personal Web site or institutional repository […]
This isn’t exactly a surprise. Everyone has expected this pretty much from about the time that Ron DeSantis insisted he had a plan to regulate social media, but it got delayed by a year, because it seemed that the Supreme Court just didn’t want to deal with it yet, and punted by asking the White […]
The most cynical take on this period of historic lows in US crime rates isn’t that we’ve locked up so many people that most crime now takes place in prisons where no one cares (or tabulates) how many criminal acts are still being committed. No, the most cynical take is this: people just got sick […]
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