A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
The NHL keeps doing this kind of crap to itself. Of all the major American sports leagues, I’d say it’s pretty clear that the National Hockey League trails all the others in terms of getting things right with the internet. The league finally piggybacked onto the MLB Advanced Media platform several years ago to power […]
On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the ComradeWorkwear website, the Most Wanted CEO cards would offer “a critique […]
If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if […]
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As I noted when the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court handed down its original decision back in 2023, I didn’t care much for the plaintiff, but I did care quite a bit about the First Amendment. Less-than-ideal litigants make some pretty good caselaw, and that’s how it went here. The plaintiff challenging Oregon’s surreptitious recording law […]
We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the TikTok ban case, which is expected to come today or tomorrow. But things are getting increasingly silly. The Biden administration, which actively pushed for the ban and eagerly signed it into law, is now making a last-ditch effort to… keep the app operating, even […]
There have been very few times I’ve encountered something in life that feels like it was absolutely made specifically for me. The Deadpool movie series is one of those few things. For my sensibilities, they’re just about perfect. And one of my favorite aspects of the films is the fourth-wall-breaking nature of the main character. […]
We’re at the halfway point of January, and that means we’re at the halfway point of the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! As in past years, we’re celebrating the entry of new works into the public domain by calling on game designers of all stripes and levels of […]
Mark Lemley is one of, if not the biggest names in IP law. So when Lemley makes a move, it’s worth paying attention. And that’s exactly what happened this week when he announced that he has “fired Meta as a client.” There are various lists that come out from time to time about the “most […]
A new Consumer Reports study unsurprisingly finds that popular exercise equipment makers collect way more data on users than is necessary, then sell access to that data to a wide variety of dodgy and largely unregulated data brokers and middle men, who in turn generally play fast and loose with it. Consumer Reports studied ten […]
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In what is almost certainly a case of too little, too late, the SEC on Tuesday sued Elon Musk for failing to file a public announcement about his secretive Twitter equity position. The lawsuit, coming nearly three years after Musk’s alleged violations, highlights the billionaire’s brazen flouting of disclosure rules and the SEC’s glacial pace […]
Even though corrections officers seem to feel these devices will help them more than they will hurt them, the Colorado Department of Corrections has decided it’s not going to equip officers with body cameras. This is a pretty terrible outcome, especially since the DOC has spent a couple years and half-million dollars on build-up before […]
It’s no secret that the world of live sports is becoming increasingly complicated due to the fractured nature of broadcast and streaming rights. Between leagues like the NFL making sure their own streaming services aren’t terribly useful and that finding any particular game requires Sherlock-ian investigative efforts, these new and complicated deals that major sports […]
Support us on Patreon » We’ve got another cross-post episode this week! Recently, Mike appeared on The Dynamist podcast from the Foundation for American Innovation for the second entry in a four-part series about copyright and artificial intelligence. He’s joined by Alex Winter and Tim Hwang, and host Evan Swarztrauber, for a discussion about how artists, […]
Great job, US government. You went so overboard with your “TikTok is an evil Chinese app” and deciding to ban it that you’re pushing kids to go even deeper into the Chinese app ecosystem. The US government’s ham-handed attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds is not only a troubling attack on free speech […]
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Hitch yourself to a wagon and see what you get. Area dog-killer/current governor/possible DHS head Kristi Noem boarded the Trump Train when it first passed through town nearly a decade ago. Since then, she’s won the loyalty of a bunch of fascist-adjacent dipshits who don’t care how much they vote against their own interests, as […]
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