In what definitely feels like a case of way too little, way too late, the WTO last week finally decided to grant the TRIPS waiver on COVID vaccines, allowing others to make more of the vaccine without violating patent rights. The WTO has long had this ability to issue a patent waiver as part of […]
We’ve got some great new discussions for the Techdirt Podcast… coming in a few weeks. But at the moment, amidst a very busy schedule on a variety of fronts, we’re taking a short break to look back on a very old conversation: our 14th episode ever, from 2015, about media companies rolling out proprietary content […]
As the big push is on to approve two internet-focused antitrust bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act, we’ve been calling out that while the overall intentions of both may be good, there are real concerns with the language of both and how it could impact content […]
The Uvalde Police Department — recipient of 40% of the city’s budget — botched its response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Rather than rush to the sound of gunfire, the officers stopped making forward progress once they were adjacent to the gunfire. It took another law enforcement agency (a Border Patrol tactical […]
Buldix is a powerful drag and drop website builder with no coding, that helps both non-techies to build their own websites and web developers to create online projects (websites/landing pages) for their clients in no time. Buldix comes with dozens of responsive pre-built templates, blocks, and elements that make building websites easy and fast for […]
Apparently missing the entire controversy the White House faced just a few weeks ago regarding Homeland Security’s poorly explained Disinformation Governance Board (which has since been put on hold), the White House is trying yet again, with its new White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse. At least this time, they didn’t […]
It’s always interesting to watch one-time disruptors shift toward turf protection, apparently remembering none of the annoyances that drove their passion for disruption (and ultimate success) in the first place. Once Netflix was as powerful as the telecom sector, it shifted its tone on issues like net neutrality. And as the now-dominant company has increasingly […]
Cops love secrecy. When a citizen does something wrong, it’s a public record. When cops do the wrong thing, union contracts, internal policies, and multiple public records exemptions often allow law enforcement agencies to keep the public from learning about misconduct. Things have been changing, though. California recently amended its public records law, making police […]
You may recall that, last fall, we wrote about a truly bizarre legal fight, in which a little-followed pseudonymous Twitter account @CallMeMoneyBags had tweeted out some images of a woman, suggesting a few times that the woman was the mistress of billionaire Brian Sheth. The account put out lots of tweets generally mocking people in […]
We’ve been pointing out for a long time now that the main antitrust bill making its way through the Senate has a hidden content moderation trojan horse in it. Indeed, it seems likely the main reason the bill has significant Republican support is that they know the bill will be abused to file vexatious lawsuits […]
CoreCivic is one of the nation’s largest private prison companies. And while it should already be concerning that we even have private prison companies, CoreCivic appears to be particularly awful. Just last week, CoreCivic was in the 9th Circuit appeals court trying to overturn a dismissal of its SLAPP lawsuit that it filed against investment […]
It appears all but inevitable that Julian Assange will be receiving an all-expenses-paid (except for his defense!) one-way trip to the United States to face espionage charges for, mostly, performing acts of journalism. The Wikileaks founder has done plenty of self-inflicted damage to his reputation over the past few years, but his organization was instrumental […]
Intego Mac Washing Machine is a Mac cleaner that makes it easy to get rid of junk files that slow down your Mac—duplicate files and programs you never use. It also helps you automatically organize things, so both you and your Mac operate more efficiently. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well says my impossibility theorem. And, basically every day we see more examples of this in action. The latest is that the NY Times reports how YouTube took down a video that the January 6th House Select Committee had posted to the site, detailing many of the […]
A few years ago the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and slowly raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Republican attempt to legislate against spam filtering of political emails: Nothing new See: The exemption that gave themselves around Texting unsolicited political spam. In second place, it’s another anonymous comment in response to a certain prolific commenter: Hyman has […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, while Diane Feinstein was calling for Section 702 reforms and the EFF was suing the FBI for withholding NSL guideline documents, UK Prime Minister Theresa May was trying to push forward with plans to kill encryption, she and French President Emmanuel Macron were both supporting internet censorship, and […]
I guess it’s time to pay get robbed by the piper. The state of Michigan has periodically enacted forfeiture reforms, often in response to bad press or lawsuit losses. Michigan law enforcement has made the most of forfeiture privileges. Thanks to a reform passed in 2015, the public finally had access to data showing just […]
It’s no secret that the Russian government has been working overtime to try to block out accurate information about its invasion of Ukraine from reaching the citizenry. That’s part of why we found it so frustrating that some supporters of Ukraine sought to make it even more difficult for Russian’s to reach the wider internet. […]
Modern reviewers put modern televisions through a gamut of different tests to determine display brightness, quality, power consumption, and other factors. Samsung, apparently thought it would be a brilliant idea to try and cheat the benchmarking system used by many reviewers to give their TVs an unfair advantage in comparison. First spotted by HDTVTest then […]
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