Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online […]
Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it’s used to extract payouts from others. Higbee & Associates, a law firm known for sending copyright demand letters to website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn’t post the photo. […]
We’ve talked for years about how the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is ripe for abuse. The legal structure of the law practically begs for such abuse: send a notice, content disappears, and the target has to fight through a slow counter-notice process to maybe get it back. The system rewards speed of takedowns over accuracy because […]
The 2026 Canva Bundle has six courses to help you learn about graphic design. From logo design to business cards to branding to bulk content creation, these courses have you covered. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals […]
Forgive me for this digression. I know it’s usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year’s posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each […]
Elon Musk is desperate to dominate the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband market. So is Jeff Bezos. And now the two billionaires are engaged in proxy fights at Trump’s FCC over who’ll get the honor. Amazon’s LEO offering, Project Leo, is significantly behind Musk’s Starlink, and has been rushing to build out its LEO satellite constellation. […]
After RFK Jr. found himself getting a rebuke from the court system over his ACIP reorganization from last year, in which the courts issued a preliminary injunction on the vaccine schedule changes ACIP recommended and staying further work from the panel, I’ve been waiting for the government to appeal the order. That appeal has not […]
There’s a meaningful push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. Passage can […]
Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved. In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn’t simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at […]
Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher […]
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, […]
The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration’s claims otherwise. DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or […]
A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it. But the ruling may come too late to save what was left of U.S public media. The original executive order resulted in […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of […]
The Supreme Court has now issued its decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. This was a case where Cox, a broadband provider, had been held liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its users, in this case via filesharing. It appealed, arguing that such secondary liability was not something that copyright law allowed. […]
Support us on Patreon » We’ve written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE’s So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the […]
Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you […]
Costco is your one-stop shop for everything you want and offers a wide range of merchandise that will likely cover all of your shopping needs! With hundreds of locations across the country, Costco is the ideal place to shop without the hassle of having to run numerous errands around town. A Gold Star Membership includes a FREE […]
Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law. The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon’s resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. […]
MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony “America first!” rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. The Wall Street Journal (Reuters […]
stLouIST