“Defund the police!” people shouted as cops continued to kill unarmed black people in ways that went far past “subjectively defensive” into “objectively racist.” Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for ten minutes, personifying 300 years of white oppression of black people. Floyd died, suspected of nothing more than […]
You may have heard that, on Friday, Mariah Carey and Sony Music were sued by a guy named Andy Stone (pretty sure a different Andy Stone than the one who leads communications for Facebook) for allegedly infringing on his song “All I Want For Christmas, Is You.” What you might not have heard is that […]
Now that we’re encountering mass shootings in America on what appears to basically be a weekly or so clip, all the tired, made-up, bullshit talking points that get trotted out to shift blame are coming off as even more tired and made-up than they did previously. We’ve now had three mass shootings that have been […]
Two years ago, just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to radically transform day-to-day life for nearly everyone on the planet, the United States Postal Service decided to protect cops from passive criticism. One month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin personified America’s omnipresent racism by kneeling on the neck of unarmed black man George […]
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There are so, so, so many different discussions going on concerning internet platform regulations, and so many of the different ideas conflict with one another. But there is a general agreement that the US really, really needs a federal privacy law. Without it, we just bounce back and forth between (1) EU and other nations’ […]
While it got lost under the obsession with “big tech,” California has been doing a lot of interesting stuff in a bid to counter “big telecom.” The state not only implemented new net neutrality rules requiring that telecom monopolies behave, it’s building a massive new open access fiber network that should go a long way […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the copyright questions around “fast movies”: If your movie is so shallow that it can be completely replaced with a 10-minite summary (or evem the trailer) then perhaps it really isn’t all that truly valuable in the first place. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, things seemed pretty bad on the privacy front. Intelligence community leaks were normalizing domestic surveillance abuses, the Fifth Circuit said no warrants were required to obtain near-realtime cell site location info, and while DHS agencies were stepping up demands for social media account info from visa applicants Congress […]
The Supreme Court made it pretty clear in its Rodriguez decision that pretextual traffic stops were fine, but once the pretext evaporated, it was time to cut civilians loose. We hold that a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable […]
I’m starting to lose count of how many regulatory proceedings there have been in the last 6 months or so to discuss “standard technical measures” in the copyright context. Doing policy work in this space is like living in a zombie movie version of “Groundhog Day” as we keep having to marshal resources to deal […]
Techdirt is one of the few remaining independent blogs. And, in many ways, I really miss the era of independent blogging that became a thing mainly in the early 2000s. Over time, most people have moved on to either new media organizations (often funded or owned by the old media organizations) or simply embraced social […]
Clearview may as well exit Europe entirely. Things are not going to get better for it. Online privacy laws are far more restrictive on the other side of the pond and Clearview’s business model will always be in violation of those laws. European laws require companies to obtain some sort of consent from the people […]
On both the state and federal level, a flood of new bills are targeting companies’ efforts to monopolize repair by implementing obnoxious DRM, making repair tools and manuals hard to find, bullying independent repair shops (like Apple does), or forcing tractor owners to drive hundreds of miles just to get their tractor repaired (one of John […]
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Senator Ron Wyden has never been shy about demanding both the government and the private sector stop doing so much damn spying on their constituents/users. Eleven years ago — long before it became apparent federal agencies were accessing/buying location data from any private party willing to give them access — Wyden was looking to enact […]
Earlier this year, we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr’s argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don’t) and should “pay their fair share” (they […]
There are several things prosecutors can’t do when handling criminal trials. They still do them, of course. They suborn perjury. They deny defendants access to exculpatory evidence. They present junk science as actual science. And, every so often, they ignore the presumption of evidence that’s supposed to be the foundation of the American justice system. […]
A little more than a week ago, the Department of Justice updated its policy regarding CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) prosecutions. For years, the DOJ had been complicit in the punishment of security researchers for doing their jobs, reasoning that unauthorized access was the only criminal element it needed to satisfy. The guidance — […]
Earlier this year, we discussed Nintendo — dubbed by me as “the Disney of video gaming” — having gone on a DMCA blitz on YouTube videos that are essentially just new and classic video game music. This has been something Nintendo has ramped up over the years, taking down 100 videos in 2019, more than […]
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