Our posts on Katy Perry in the past have been all over the place. Sometimes Perry is an intellectual property bully. Sometimes she’s more the victim of intellectual property bullying. But what is not in dispute is the Katy Perry is a cultural icon worldwide with an extremely famous, albeit misspelled, name. In Australia, Katie […]
A year ago, we wrote about an unfortunate decision by a judge rejecting a motion to dismiss in a copyright lawsuit regarding bananas taped to walls. There was, of course, the high profile “banana taped to wall” artwork by Maurizio Cattelan that got tons of public attention at Art Basel in 2019 when it sold […]
Over the past two years, there has been a concerted push by state legislatures to regulate the Internet, the likes of which has not been seen since the late 90s/early aughts. Content moderation, financial relationships between journalists and platforms, social media design and transparency, “national security,” kids being exposed to “bad” Internet speech—you name it, […]
The First Amendment protects speech, even the horrible stuff. It can’t protect the speaker from being criticized for being abhorrent, despite what many abhorrent people believe. It can, however, in certain cases, protect the speaker from being punished for this speech. It’s not blanket coverage. The person engaging in the speech generally has to be […]
Luminar Neo is easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at its […]
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We’ve discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman’s new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many […]
Satellite TV provider Dish Network isn’t having much fun. Despite oodles of direct government assistance during the Trump era, the company’s attempt to pivot from mediocre satellite TV provider to modern streaming TV and 5G wireless giant has been a consistent dumpster fire. Both the company’s dying satellite TV service and its streaming TV platform (SlingTV) have […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is radix with a summary of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s comments about the blackout protest: “We don’t do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work” is quite the statement. In second place, it’s miked with some additional info on […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018 began with a much-anticipated day: the official end of net neutrality rules. We took a long look at Ajit Pai’s latest comments about the change, while the FCC was busy fending off questions about the DDoS attack it made up (and also, randomly, about Pai’s big coffee mug), […]
Amazon-owned Twitch appears to be running something of an experiment to see just how much it can piss off its creative community before a mass exodus occurs. Reading back through our posts on the platform, you will be left with the understanding that there are two types of policy rollouts when it comes to Twitch. […]
Via Tarah Wheeler (who just destroyed the EARN IT Act recently) we find out that, while the White House has announced that it wants public comment on AI regulation, it hasn’t made it at all easy to figure out how to actually comment. I’m smashblogging on a Saturday because I came across this story on […]
NSO Group is irredeemable. It must know that by know. Its investors know it. The public knows it. Even the government of the country it set up shop in — a shop filled with ex-government employees — can hardly seem to stomach being associated with it. At any point, this could have been prevented. The […]
Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and […]
It’s renewal time again, and this time the snooper squad is facing unprecedented push back. Sure, a lot of it is politically motivated, what with the post-Trumpians still getting high on their own “deep state” supply. Even as opportunistic as they are, they still have a point: some of their own have been subjected to […]
Tableau 10 is the data visualization tool that breaks mounds of information down into clear, actionable insights, making it a valuable tool for any data-driven guru. This course will show you how to get started with Tableau 10, so you can create powerful visualizations and guide your business with solid, accessible answers. It’s on sale […]
Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subreddits as something not worth paying attention to resulted in many subreddits extending their protests indefinitely, Huffman apparently thought it would make […]
You may have noticed that for-profit healthcare in the U.S. is already a hot mess, especially in the most already marginalized parts of the country. Giant, mismanaged health care conglomerates have long pushed their underfunded staffers to the brink, while routinely under-investing in necessary technical upgrades and improvements. It’s getting consistently worse everywhere, but in […]
Open access has been discussed many times here on Techdirt. There are several strands to its story. It’s about allowing the public to access research they have paid for through tax-funded grants, without needing to take out often expensive subscriptions to academic titles. It’s about saving educational institutions money that they are currently spending on over-priced academic […]
You may recall that, back during the last net neutrality open comment period, the FCC’s comment system was overrun by millions of faked comments, including from many dead people. Not surprisingly, it was eventually determined that legacy broadband companies funded the fake comment submissions, which they felt they needed to do because actual activists were […]
Well, here’s some welcome news! It appears the EU Commission may have learned something from the less-than-wholehearted support it received following the introduction of its CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) bill. The proposal hoped to curb the spread of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) by mandating (among other things) client-side scanning of user content. All well […]
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