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The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in America was, at best, inadequate. Many voters who felt subservient to a failed businessman chose to view the pandemic as a conspiracy meant to unseat Donald Trump. Millions died. Many more millions continue to suffer. Schools reacted by offering a variety of learning options to students, including the […]

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) was supposed to change the world. According to carriers, not only was it supposed to bring about the “fourth industrial revolution,” it was supposed to revolutionize everything from smart cities to cancer treatment. Simultaneously, conspiracy theorists and internet imbeciles declared that 5G was responsible for everything from COVID-19 to your migraines. Unfortunately for both […]

There’s an interesting post on the TorrentFreak blog about “fast movies“: These heavily edited copies of mainstream movies aim to summarize key plot lines via voice-over narration in about 10 minutes. While no replacement for the real thing, these edits accumulated millions of views and incurred the wrath of rightsholders, leading to the arrest of […]

Not only have corporate efforts to monopolize repair resulted in a flood of proposed state and federal laws, the Biden Administration’s recent executive order on monopoly power and competition urged the FTC to tighten up its rules on repair monopolization efforts, whether it’s ham-fisted DRM, or making repair manuals, parts, and diagnostics hard to come by. At the […]

Well, this doesn’t sound like a good idea. The company that recently swore in court filings it would cease and desist sales to all private companies in the United States is offering its product to a number of private companies elsewhere in the world. And it’s courting private contractors doing business with government entities in […]

It’s no secret that copyright and libraries are often in conflict with one another. We’ve pointed out repeatedly how modern publishers would never allow libraries to come into existence if they weren’t here already. The publishers have made that clear by trying to sue out of existence all sorts of things that appear to be […]

It feels somewhat strange to write this post today, short though it may be. We now live in the wake of yet another mass shooting, this time at an elementary school in Texas. It was only weeks ago that we were dealing with the aftermath of the racist attack on a Buffalo grocery store. In […]

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Back in 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided there was nothing wrong with the indefinite gag orders the government slapped on its (extremely plentiful) National Security Letters (NSL). It told Cloudflare, Credo Mobile, and other parties challenging these gag orders that the Constitution remains untroubled by the government’s demands for silence, which could […]

Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users who shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as […]

For the past couple of years, we have been tracking Sony’s long overdue foray into making its first party titles available to the PC gaming market. Sony, famous for walling off these titles and making them Playstation exclusives, began loosening that grip in 2020. MLB: The Show suddenly appeared on other consoles (though not on […]

Exhale. Just a little while ago, the Supreme Court put Texas’s ridiculous content moderation law back on hold. Specifically, it granted NetChoice and CCIA’s emergency application to put the law on hold, following the 5th Circuit’s decision to reinstate the law without any explanation (which came about in response to a district court’s lengthy explanation […]

In discussions about content moderation, it’s easy to get stuck in the mindset that there are only a few simple ways it could possibly work — but in fact there is plenty of room for exploring creative alternatives. One such idea examined in a recent paper by Aviv Ovadya, Technology and Public Purpose Fellow at […]

Two years ago we wrote about how the Wikimedia Foundation was blocked from gaining observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) after China objected, over some bizarre nonsense because there happens to be a volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. Obviously, it makes sense for Wikimedia to have observer status at WIPO, as excessive copyright can […]

Whenever cops discover a new means or method of tracking people that seems to run afoul of the letter (if not the spirit) of the Fourth Amendment, they’re quick to defend these actions by claiming they’re necessary to hunt down the most dangerous of criminals: terrorists, sexual exploiters of children, kidnappers, homicide suspects, etc. When […]

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The Supreme Court has taken two swings at this issue: whether or not artistic expression can also be evidence of criminal activity. Two cases with obviously serious First Amendment implications and yet the nation’s top court felt there was no need for it to establish a bright line that might deter future prosecutions based on […]

We’ve noted more than a few times how net neutrality rules were just some stopgap rules to prevent telecom monopolies from being assholes in the absence of real competition. They were modest protections (by international standards) attempting to protect consumers and competitors from giant unchecked monopolies we’ve let run amok for the better part of […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are anonymous responses to commenters trotting out the same old, boring, easily dismissed arguments about content moderation on our post about how very little content moderation has anything to do with politics. In first place, it’s a response to someone basically just saying “nuh-uh, of course […]