One of the central “justifications” for copyright is that it is indispensable if creativity is to be viable. Without it, we are assured, artists would starve. This ignores the fact that artists created and thrived for thousands of years before the 1710 Statute of Anne. But leaving that historical detail aside, as well as the […]
We’ve noted for a while now how Elon Musk’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn’t going to be the miraculous revolution many people think. For one thing, the service can currently only provide service to a maximum of around 800,000 subscribers globally. For context, around 20-40 million people in the U.S. lack broadband, and 83 […]
Last week, the EU and the US announced something important that sounds pretty boring — a new “privacy shield” agreement. You should know it’s important, because in the midst of dealing with everything else, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden actually made a public statement with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen […]
It appears several legislators haven’t learned anything from the months of anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. What should have provoked a reassessment of law enforcement’s contribution to society, and a closer examination of their means and methods, […]
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Techno moral panics are back in fashion, it seems. There have been multiple (misleading) stories about “kids and social media“, and then there are always attempts to dive into specific “new” services. Last fall, it was all about the kids and their TikTok challenges. But, Tiktok is so last year. So now CNN is back […]
Last week, Reuters broke the quasi-news that Clearview had offered its tech to the war effort in Ukraine. According to statements made solely by the company and its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, the Ukraine government was using Clearview’s 10-billion facial image database (all scraped for free from the open web) to identify dead bodies, point out […]
I’ll give Nintendo this much: the company certainly is an absolute master at enforcing copyright in the most extreme, pettiest manner possible. I’ve already had some fun comparing Nintendo to Disney, in that the way the company is handling shutting down older game stores and making those games no longer available in most places is […]
One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, […]
It seems that each week another ridiculously unconstitutional “content moderation” bill pops up in another state. Beyond the fact that nearly all of these bills are preempted by federal law (and are unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment) it seems that state legislatures feel the need to score political points. And it’s not just one party. […]
The FBI owes its oversight — and the public the oversight serves — plenty of answers. But let’s set our expectations any higher than reality dictates. The FBI is not exactly a paradigm of complicity. Remember “going dark?” Two consecutive FBI directors claimed an insanely large number of locked devices was preventing investigators from investigating. […]
Go Vote On The Sweet Sixteen! Our inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstanding March Madness has been getting lots of buzz (and votes) and now we’re down to just sixteen remaining legal misunderstanding matchups! Some of these are starting to get tough! In round two there were some pretty closer matchups… and some total laughers. Of the […]
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We’ve covered some of the difficulties Trump’s Truth Social is having getting users to actually use the platform, and the same appears to be true for the various other Trumpist Twitter wannabes like Parler and GETTR. NBC News has a somewhat hilarious story in which its reporters went to talk to “conservative influencers” to get […]
U.S. regulatory enforcement and punishment for companies that rip consumers off with sneaky fees is not what you’d call… consistent. For example, the telecom and cable industries have long exploited a wide array of bullshit fees to jack up advertised prices with only fleeting penalties. The same can be said for the banking, airline, hotel, […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come from our post about the cops who killed a drunk driver as he told them at least a dozen times that he couldn’t breathe. In first place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a response to a commenter who tried to wipe away the entire incident […]
So far, in our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we’ve looked at Best Adaptation The Wall Across The River and Best Deep Cut The Obstruction Method. Today, it’s time for the winner of the Best Remix category: Dreaming The Cave by David […]
Once again, here comes the video game industry to do good in the world. Despite being the easy villain for many, including grandstanding politicians, video games and their communities can often be seen doing good for the world. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how one itch.io game bundle was offering thousands of dollars […]
Let’s start this off by noting that I actually think that Elon Musk sometimes receives both too much criticism from some circles and too much praise from others. I think he deserves tremendous praise for taking visions that, at the time, seemed nearly impossible, and then making them real. From electric vehicles with Tesla, to […]
ICE has never really cared about the people it detains and processes for removal. It cared even less when President Trump made it clear he believed anyone less white and privileged than he is deserved to be excluded from the “American dream.” Trump claimed he wanted the “worst of the worst” removed to make America […]
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