This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Cdevon2 with a response to the notion that it’s somehow ironic for people who wanted to leave Twitter to be complaining about not being able to read tweets: You assume that the same people who are actively leaving the site are the ones complaining […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the latest text of the EU Copyright Directive showed it to be even more disastrous than expected. Thus, its defenders and apologists were busy responding variously with substance-free denial, vague defenses lacking any understanding of the issues, accidental revelations of the true scope of their internet-destroying goals, and […]
The ongoing saga that is Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision Blizzard continues! As a brief review of the scoreboard will show: the EU has approved the purchase, the UK’s CMA has blocked it and Microsoft has appealed that decision, and the lawsuit brought by the FTC in the States is currently in the pretrial phase. […]
NetChoice has been quite busy the last few years suing to stop a wide variety of terrible state laws designed to mess up parts of the internet. It took on Florida’s social media content moderation law and won (twice). It took on Texas’ social media content moderation law and won at the district court, and […]
The Internet is amazing, but it’s not perfect. There are many aspects that are unsatisfactory – its protocols are inefficient, and it is far from resilient. The InterPlanetary File System, created in 2014, aims to address some of these deficiencies. On its main site it is described as: A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity’s […]
It appears the race is on to see whether it will be the EU or the US in promulgating worse regulations around generative AI tools. The EU (as has been its MO over the last few years) is taking the lead. A few weeks back the EU Parliament passed a draft regulation for AI. There’s […]
Late last year, Senator Josh Hawley — the fist-pumping supporter of Trump-approved insurrection — generated the last bit of his Missouri state government legacy. Having been successfully sued for violating state public records laws while acting as the state attorney general, Hawley was ordered to pay $12,000 by Judge Jon Beetem. The total bill included […]
Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. Scrivener makes it easy to structure ideas, write a first draft, […]
There have been a bunch of attempts over the last few years to try to get around Section 230, and to sue various websites under a “negligence” theory under the law, arguing that the online service was somehow negligent in failing to protect a user, and therefore Section 230 shouldn’t apply. Some cases have been […]
While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human-based problems: namely greed and laziness. If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The result: articles […]
The depressing tale of how the European Union passed copyright’s worst new law, the EU Copyright Directive, occupies some 36 pages in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free). The main legislation was finalized over four years ago, but countries are still grappling with the problem of implementing its sometimes contradictory requirements in national laws. […]
Just fucking fight it out already. The whole stupid “cage match” brawl thing was started when Meta execs made some (accurate) cracks about Elon’s management of Twitter, and Elon couldn’t handle it. But, now with the launch of Meta’s Threads, Elon feels the need to send a ridiculously laughable legal threat to Meta. Elon’s legal […]
Never mind fitting the description, even though that, too, has its own problems. In Texas, it apparently only matters how your name is spelled. If you share a name with a criminal suspect, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said you have no recourse if you’re wrongly arrested and detained for multiple days. That […]
As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to […]
Last week’s 6-3 decision in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, with all the conservative justices vindicating a website designer’s ability to refuse to build a website celebrating gay marriage, may seem at first glance to be a blow to gay rights. And maybe that’s what some or all of the six justices in the […]
Learn Spanish, French, Italian, German, and many more languages with Babbel. Developed by over 100 expert linguists, Babbel is helping millions of people speak and understand a new language quickly, and with confidence. After just one month, you will be able to speak about practical topics, such as transportation, dining, shopping, directions, making friends, and […]
One has to think that Donald Trump judicial appointee Judge Terry Doughty deliberately waited until July 4th (when the courts are closed) to release his ruling on the requested preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from communicating with social media companies. The results of the ruling are not a huge surprise, given Doughty’s now recognized […]
We’ve documented extensively how the AT&T—>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery mergers have been a gargantuan pointless mess, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, widespread animosity across Hollywood, the death or decay of numerous popular brands (from Mad Magazine to HBO), weird holes in streaming catalogs, and just a shittier, dumber product overall. While the first […]
Does this look like someone carrying a gun? That’s from a recent federal court decision [PDF], granting defendant Luis Cerda’s motion to suppress. NYPD sergeant Christopher Colon saw something else. He saw a gun. He needed to see a gun. He was so desperate to bust someone else entirely (Alberto Santiago, a.k.a. “Dot Com”) that […]
One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against […]
stLouIST