So, I already had a quick post on the bizarre decision by the 5th Circuit to reinstate Texas’ social media content moderation law just two days after a bizarrely stupid hearing on it. However, I don’t think most people actually understand just how truly fucked up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. Indeed, there are […]
Florida and Texas both passed blatantly unconstitutional laws limiting the ability of social media websites to moderate. Lawsuits were filed challenging both laws. In both cases, the district courts correctly blocked the laws from going into effect, noting that it was obviously a 1st Amendment violation to tell websites how they could and could not […]
The thing about absolute immunity is it tends to be absolute. Except when it isn’t. This immunity — one that protects prosecutors, judges, and certain politicians — can be stripped, but it happens so rarely it’s little more than a rounding error in the totality of civil rights lawsuits. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, another case involving stripped […]
Malibu Media. Okay, I’ll wait while your eyes finish rolling all the way. Anyway, the makers of porn under the banner of X-Art have also attempted to build a business in the far stickier industry of copyright trolling. Malibu has a long history of using potentially fake witnesses, failing to serve defendants properly, and running […]
The country that promised to allow Hong Kong to choose its own leadership until at least 2047 is putting the finishing touches on its ahead-of-schedule oppression. Pro-democracy protests greeted China’s incursion into the area, alerting the world to the fact the ultra-profitable region was being invaded by forces indistinguishable from those that had turned China […]
Look, we’ve tried to explain over and over again that Elon Musk doesn’t understand free speech or content moderation. He also seems entirely clueless about the incredible lengths that Twitter has gone to in order to actually protect free speech online (including fighting in court over it) and what it has done to deal with […]
Some (mostly) good news has arrived, courtesy of Hayley Tsukayama and Eva Galperin of the EFF. The Maryland legislature has passed a bill that would require law enforcement officers to be trained to better spot stalkerware deployment and give them a better understanding of applicable laws related to electronic surveillance and tracking. The bill, S.B. […]
The Complete Microsoft Windows, 365, and Teams Training Bundle has 7 courses covering all things Microsoft to help you become an MS expert. You’ll learn how to support and configure Windows 10 desktops in an organizational environment, how to plan a mobile application management strategy, how to set up, implement, and manage Office 365 workloads […]
Apparently, I never should have wished on that old monkey’s paw for copyright term reduction. One of the very reasons why Techdirt exists in the first place, and why it was started nearly 25 years ago, was to fight back against over expansive copyright laws, and, as such, we’ve spent many years and many posts […]
As we recently noted, Netflix is preparing for a big crackdown on users who share account passwords with folks outside of their home. When Netflix was a pesky upstart it declared password sharing a good thing and a form of free advertising. Now that it’s facing Wall Street pressure to keep quarterly earnings up in […]
China’s longstanding war on the internet, especially relating to children’s use of it, continues. Readers here will be well aware of the plethora of actions taken by China over the years to limit what its residents can see and do with the internet. From the Great Firewall of China to the country’s more targeted approach […]
Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as part of the EU Copyright Directive. The answer turned out to be a rather unclear “yes, but…“. Martin Husovec, an assistant professor of law at the London […]
From the Internet of very broken things to telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in […]
We’ve talked a fair bit about Australia’s ridiculous “News Bargaining Code,” which is literally nothing more than a tax on Facebook and Google for sending traffic to media organizations. Again, the law requires Facebook and Google (and just Facebook and Google) to pay media organizations for sending them web traffic. This is, of course, backwards […]
Laura Loomer still thinks she can sue her way back onto Facebook and Twitter. In support of her argument, she brings arguments that failed in the DC Appeals Court as well as a bill for $124k in legal fees for failing to show that having your account reported is some sort of legally actionable conspiracy […]
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It’s becoming quite clear that Elon Musk’s approach to dealing with complex issues is not to actually understand the complex realities behind them, but to simply say what he thinks an audience wants to hear, and perhaps relatedly, to simply accept the last thing that someone presented to him as the official state of things. […]
This week the Biden administration spent some time celebrating its accomplishments on broadband. The nation’s about to invest $42 billion in expanding broadband access (even though we still haven’t mapped broadband accurately). The administration also implemented the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which doles out a $30 discount on broadband for qualifying low income households. In […]
In news that is altogether so unsurprising it needs a “resigned sob” emoji attached, a Reuters investigation has found that far-right extremists are training cops because of course they are. Given law enforcement’s beginnings as an entity tasked with ensuring plantation owners maintained their access to free labor, it’s little wonder that cop shops have […]
We’re still pretty much in the dark about Elon Musk’s real plans for Twitter. He had talked a little about changing how Twitter’s subscription product worked, and then the only other idea that had leaked was a weird one about trying to charge media organizations to quote or embed tweets. However, late last week, the […]
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