This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to worrisome ruling in California that denied Section 230 protections to Snapchat because it has disappearing messages. In first place, it’s radix with thoughts on the potential implications: I can’t wait for every document shredding company to be swept up in every […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we kicked off the new year with a copyright lawsuit over dance moves in Fortnite, while the EU made its first attempt at listing pirate sites and included a bunch of non-infringing sites. Similarly, we looked at how antipiracy outfits routinely claim copyright infringement against sites that simply […]
I’m always heartened to see another local news team start digging into asset forfeiture. Especially the ones that don’t sugarcoat the findings with headlines that read like they were crafted by law enforcement officials. Charlotte, North Carolina’s NBC affiliate, WCNC, tells it like it is. Although it puts quotes around a couple of phrases, it […]
It’s no secret that there are mountains of examples of companies and individuals attempting to use intellectual property laws merely to silence critics and disappear information from the internet. While I’m sure this sort of thing must somtimes work, it’s also quite common for these would-be censorial folks to be introduced to the Streisand Effect […]
The technological marvel of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, developed by AI engineers and experts, has posed a unique challenge in the realm of copyright law. These advanced AI systems, which undergo extensive training on diverse datasets, including copyrighted material, and provide output highly dependent on user “prompts,” have raised questions about the bounds […]
The banal will never capture as much attention as the lurid. I’m sure that this opening sentence will be seized upon by the many critics of my posts criticizing cops. So be it. Just be aware that we expect our public servants to be banal at almost any cost. That’s a sign of competence and […]
Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you’ll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation – giving you the ultimate techniques to […]
Okay, look, at this point, we need to start calling out those in positions of power who insist that it’s unquestionable that social media is harmful to kids when the don’t present any evidence at all to back up those assertions. Because as we’ve been documenting, every single study that comes out these days seems […]
While Comcast’s streaming service Peacock has now reached 30 million subscribers, Comcast has been taking an absolute bath on the proposition. Comcast CEO Mike Cavanagh says the company lost nearly $3 billion dollars on the effort last year alone. The other streaming giants haven’t fared a whole lot better. Warner Bros Discovery, Disney, and Paramount all […]
The war on China’s video game industry by the Chinese government continues, but it appears that its casualties aren’t only within the industry itself. Over the last couple of years, the Chinese government has put more and more restrictions on the gaming industry, primarily aimed at youths, that were designed for everything from restricting how […]
If you love to irrationally hate, you’ll hate this. The Iowa legislature recently shat out a bill that allowed the state to start punishing people for not being straight and/or white. It was signed into law by another hateful person, Governor Kim Reynolds — the head of (this) state that recently made it clear she’s […]
On January 1, 2024, the parent company of Pornhub.com geo-blocked adult users in the states of Montana and North Carolina. Aylo, the site’s corporate parent, said they did so in protest to laws these states adopted requiring adult platforms to verify their users’ ages through various age-check tools. This isn’t the first time Aylo geo-blocked IP […]
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Regulatory agencies can often be an essential part of day-to-day life, preventing people from engaging in activities they have no expertise in — something that could potentially endanger a lot of people. But they can also be overbearing brutes whose only concern is whether or not they’ve managed to extract as much money as possible […]
Well, this is dumb. As detailed by NBC News, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff has rejected a perfectly reasonable attempt by SnapChat to have a lawsuit thrown out on Section 230 grounds. The case involves family members of kids who overdosed on illegal drugs like fentanyl, suing Snap for apparently providing the connection […]
During Trump’s tenure, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The Trump FCC stripped away a lot of the rules […]
Let’s roll into the new year by saying what needs to be said: if you’re arguing against government transparency, you’re on the wrong side of history. But being on the wrong side of history is just something cops love to do. They figure the short term wins — if there are any — might somehow […]
As you well know, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain in the US, meaning you can use a version of that Mickey (or any other newly public domain work) in our Gaming Like It’s 1928 Public Domain Game Jam. Also, we’re already seeing some of the expected effort […]
Thanks to politicians (including a former president) being overly willing to scratch the bigoted itch of a voting bloc that appears to prefer the brutal caress of fascism to the freedoms of a democratic republic, far too many state and local legislators are crafting and enacting laws designed to relegate a whole lot of the […]
A few months ago we noted that Fidelity, which had contributed over $300 million to help Elon purchase Twitter a little over a year ago, had already marked down its investment by 65%. This news came out at basically the same time that Elon himself admitted the company’s value was down 56% (from $44 billion […]
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