This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have […]
Yikes. Deputy Boyd stayed for approximately two hours, during which time he made numerous inappropriate sexual statements and commands, which the district court found were neither invited nor consensual. For example, Deputy Boyd told Tyson that he and fellow officers had recently seen her at a restaurant, and he repeated sexual comments that the officers […]
For the last few months we’ve been writing a lot about AICOA, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, being pushed for by Senator Amy Klobuchar. It’s an antitrust bill, but not an antitrust bill designed to fix the whole host of problems we have today with industrial consolidation and anticompetitive practices. No, it’s just […]
It’s an election year, and like clockwork, legislators around the country want to show they care about protecting kids online. This pre-election frenzy leads performative bills that won’t actually help any kids. Today I’m blogging about one of those bills, California AB 2408, “Social media platform: child users: addiction.” (For more on how the California legislature […]
Is it too much to ask that politicians try to live in reality? The obsession over the past few years that anything bad that people say on the internet is the fault of the internet (rather than the people using it) and must be outlawed is already problematic enough. But the politicians and their “solutions” […]
Governments love targeting Twitter for user data requests, but apparently now more than ever. The latest Twitter transparency report says new records are being set in the data request sector. The social network saw “record highs” in the number of account data requests during the July-December 2021 reporting period, with 47,572 legal demands on 198,931 […]
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As you may have heard, a few days ago, the FTC announced that it was seeking to block Meta’s acquisition of Within Unlimited, a maker of a popular VR fitness app. I believe this is the first case in which the Lina Khan-run FTC has stepped in to block an acquisition by one of the […]
At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers […]
Over these many years, we’ve talked about a myriad of ways in which people and companies can respond to copyright infringement. The common reaction, and probably the one most natural, is for those copyright holders to absolutely freak out, scream about lost sales and “teh pirates!!1!”, and then turn to their lawyers. Others take a […]
NSO Group has gone from being an under-the-radar spyware darling selling powerful phone hackery to some of the absolutely worst governments in the world to being an extremely exposed malware pariah which has sold powerful phone hackery to some of the absolute worst governments in the world. A data dump last summer served as a […]
It is bizarre that the California legislature, in a state that has produced most of the biggest internet companies out there, has apparently decided it wants to destroy them all in a flood of purely vexatious litigation. There are a whole series of bills that the legislature is reviewing, and so many of them are […]
ShotSpotter — the gunshot analytic company with the rather sketchy reputation — is, once again, endearing itself to the public by doing things that seem… well… sketchy. On Friday, an attorney representing ShotSpotter, a gunshot-detection technology company, made the unusual request that a judge in a criminal case hold the company in contempt of court […]
Over the last few months, we’ve been covering a ridiculous situation in which Republicans are trying to force their spam into your inboxes. It began with a study that some Republicans misread (or deliberately misinterpreted) to claim that Google was “censoring” their political mailings. That study showed that for an untrained, brand new mailbox, Google […]
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The only surprise in this decision isn’t that the court ruled the way it did. It’s that the Grand Rapids, Michigan police department apparently believed it wasn’t a violation of rights. Here are the origins of the case, as summarized by ABC affiliate WZZM. (WZZM apparently feels no one needs to read the actual opinion […]
Democrats have a “strategy” they really love to employ that involves pushing bills they know will never pass. The idea is that while the bill may not pass, it will bring extra attention to whatever issue they’re pushing, and force the GOP to put their opposition to (policy X) on the record, shaming them publicly. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment on our post asking why the media is lamenting Disney’s loss of copyright instead of celebrating the public domain: ‘Copyright is for companies, not the public!’ The US spent so long with nothing entering the public domain and […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Senator Wyden was seeking answers about how many times Americans have been targeted by one of the least-discussed NSA surveillance programs, while we noted the silence from tech companies as the clock ticked down on Section 702 renewal (while newly released documents showed even more violations by the […]
I’ll preface this post with this short bit of throat-clearing: no writer or reader of this site should expect the average person on the street to understand the nuances of intellectual property at the same level of those of us interested in the topic. The law is complicated and nuanced, and the layperson is simply […]
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