Colorado is the latest state to move forward on new “right to repair” legislation despite a growing and sustained lobbying effort by industry. The Colorado House of Representatives passed the bipartisan Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act (HB23-1011) with a 44-17 vote on Tuesday, the first major right to repair legislation to be passed […]
For years, law enforcement agencies converted themselves into quasi-military agencies with the assistance of the Defense Department. Whatever the military no longer needed, cops could have for cheap or free, as long as they remembered to say things about “national security” when filling out their 1033 program requisitions. Unsurprisingly, the acquisition of warrior gear (camouflage […]
Karl just wrote about CNET, a once-vaunted resource for tech journalism, absolutely stepping on every rake it could find by using AI-generated content that was absolutely laughable: the content tended to be inaccurate, plagiarized, or otherwise so full of mistakes that an army of editors had to rework the content, largely wiping away any cost […]
If you’ve been reading Techdirt recently, you probably know all about supposed “AI Lawyer” service DoNotPay and the tireless investigation of the company undertaken by Kathryn Tewson, who has written a couple of Techdirt posts about the saga. This week, Kathryn joins us on the podcast for a long and entertaining discussion about the entire […]
And here I was thinking that the last few months of Twitter shenanigans with Elon Musk at the helm had done something nearly impossible: made Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership of Meta (Facebook/Instagram) look thoughtful and balanced in comparison. But then, on Sunday, Zuckberg announced that Meta is following Musk down the dubious road of making “verification” […]
To fend off a ban in the U.S., TikTok lobbyists have attempted to put on a doomed charm offensive in DC, spending a record $5.4 million on U.S. lawmaker influence last year. The effort has even involved opening “transparency centers” in DC designed to “educate” lawmakers on content moderation and the steps TikTok is apparently […]
Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about the Complete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you’ll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting […]
A lot of people freaked out on Friday after the news came out that Twitter was going to make SMS two-factor authentication (2FA) only available to paid Twitter Blue subscribers. The news was first broken, like so much Twitter news these days, by Platformer reporter Zoe Schiffer. It’s understandable that people were up in arms […]
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 […]
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