Legislating from the bench is always problematic. People who like what courts have decided will claim this was the right thing to do. People who don’t like the decision will claim this is an overstep. Whatever the case in Virginia, this is good news. Legislation from the bench happened. But it didn’t turn into actual […]
You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, […]
In January, we asked designers to create games based on works that entered the public domain this year for our fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! It took us a little while to get through all the entries, but now it’s time to announce the winners, and it was not an […]
What if we told you the Stupid Patent of the Month has a sponsor, but we don’t know who it is? That would seem shady, wouldn’t it? This month’s stupid patent, U.S. Patent No. 9,986,435, was brought to you—to all of us, really—from the murky depths of the litigation finance industry. Originally assigned to a shell […]
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Big data has always been big business but, in recent years, it’s also become big government business. The stuff advertisers like is also stuff the government likes. Millions of tax dollars have been fed to private companies offering government agencies a wealth of information they’ve never had access to before. Everyone carries a computer in […]
Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to proclaim himself a defender of free speech, but time and time again he’s looked to stifle, suppress, and silence speech. He’s done it with his social media bill that limits the 1st Amendment rights of social media sites, with his Stop WOKE Act which literally bars speech, and with […]
So we’ve noted more than a few times that Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab. The company had already raised prices, it had already monetized the thing it was worried about (it already charges you extra if you want more simultaneous streams), and its hard 180 from encouraging password sharing to demonizing […]
And if that title didn’t really confuse you all that much, then you’ve managed to get the point. Eminem hasn’t been shy about asserting his intellectual property rights in the past, though much of his efforts on that front have actually been to the benefit of artists from his fights with record labels. That doesn’t […]
I’m not sure what’s happening inside Israel’s intelligence services, but it’s not sending the world its best when it’s done with them. For months, we’ve been covering tons of negative news generated by tech companies started up by former Israeli government employees. Most of this has been focused on NSO Group, a malware merchant with […]
After years of criticism about their inaccuracy, the FCC recently spent another $50 million (on top of the $350 million they’d already spent) on supposedly better broadband maps. But the end result is still a bit of a mess, with entrenched telecom monopolies like Comcast being repeatedly caught claiming to deliver broadband in areas that […]
One of the key things that Elon Musk promised in taking over Twitter was about how he was going to be way more transparent. He’s mentioned it many times, specifically noting that transparency is how he would build “trust” in the company. So, anyway, about that… over a decade ago, the big internet companies set […]
While we’re waiting to see if the Trump-stocked Supreme Court is going to end the internet as we know it, the nation’s top court has been rejecting, without comment, other essential cases that really could have used another set of judicial eyes. On Wednesday, we covered one of the Supreme Court’s passes — this one […]
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It’s become frustrating how often people insist that losing this or that social media account is “censorship” and an “attack on free speech.” Not only is it not that, it makes a mockery of those who face real censorship and real attacks on free speech. The Washington Post recently put out an amazing feature about […]
If anyone can call a government’s bluff, it’s Signal. It’s a nonprofit, which means it doesn’t need to make a bunch of shareholders happy by capitulating to ridiculous government demands in order to retain market share. Governments really can’t threaten Signal. It doesn’t collect or retain user information, so it can’t hand this data over […]
This week, our both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about attempts to censor and control the internet “for the children”. In first place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with the first comment on the post: Wow, it’s almost as if a bunch of moralizing busybodies want to control what […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the FCC’s broadband availability data was being derided as inaccurate and “shameful”, while the agency was relaunching its map that hallucinates broadband competition. We got a clear idea of when net neutrality protections would formally end, while more than half of US states were pushing their own net […]
At this point it should be common knowledge that if it has to do with any kind of speech, there is nothing that China won’t try to control and/or censor. It’s something of an amazing self-contradiction: in order to be large and powerful, the Beijing government believes it has to behave as though it is […]
ShotSpotter claims its gunshot detection tech is something cities battling gun violence just can’t (almost literally) live without. Data generated by cities paying millions for the tech often says otherwise. On multiple occasions over the past few years, cities have terminated their contracts with ShotSpotter, citing the tech’s overall uselessness. Cops in Newark, New Jersey […]
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