Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street’s utterly […]
The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) published a report on body cam use by law enforcement agencies in 2014. It not only presented stats on body cam use around the nation, but also attempted to create a set of best practices for the agencies utilizing them. Since then, body cams have become as commonplace as […]
Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems of open access. An important editorial in the journal Web Ecology raises an issue for open access that I’ve not seen mentioned before. It concerns the fraught issue of rebuttal articles, which offer fact-based criticism of already-published academic papers: Critical comments on published articles vary in importance; they can […]
Patents are supposed to be an incentive to invent. Too often, they end up being a way to try to claim “ownership” of what should be basic building blocks of human activity, culture, and knowledge. This is especially true of software patents, an area EFF has been speaking out about for more than 20 years now. […]
When law enforcement officers screw up, it’s always someone else’s fault. It’s the lack of trust or support for police officers, something that has steadily declined in the last half-decade. It’s a lack of funding, even though law enforcement agencies have rarely seen their budgets cut. It’s people emboldened by accountability efforts. It’s the hundreds […]
Last year, we wrote a bunch about how the Utah legislature was rushing through a bill to destroy the internet by claiming they were doing it “for the children.” There were all sorts of obvious problems with the bill, and even though it was clearly unconstitutional, Utah Governor Spencer Cox not only signed it, but […]
One reason that “right to repair” reform has such broad, bipartisan public support is because there’s really no aspect of your daily life that isn’t touched by it. The effort to monopolize repair isn’t just the territory of Apple or game console makers like Sony and Microsoft. The problem is present in everything from the […]
When we’re young, impressionable, and financially incapable of donating significant amounts of money to super PACs, we’re taught that the American government is a system of checks and balances. Civics classes explain there are three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial — all of which are supposed to be independent and equally powerful. The […]
Copyright strikes on hosted video content happens all the time. There are tons of strikes issued in error, plenty that are purely fraud and abuse, and a bunch that may have been done in good faith but completely fail to recognize if and when specific content would be protected by fair use. What doesn’t happen […]
Aylo Holdings, the parent company of Pornhub and some of the largest free and premium porn sites in the world, agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to help resolve a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into the platform’s conduct related to a sex trafficking scheme. According to documents provided by the Department of Justice […]
A recent Guardian interview with the British Library’s head of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, reveals the problems caused by copyright for those tasked with preserving modern culture. In some respects, the British Library finds itself in a fortunate position, as Rossi explains: Because we collect under non-print legal deposit [the regulation that grants the British […]
With the 13-in-1 Docking Station, you can use all of your devices while they stay connected and charged. It includes 2 HDMI, 1 VGA, 3 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, 1 USB-C data, 1 USB-C charging, 1 SD card, 1 TF card, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 3.5mm Aux port. All of these features make […]
Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how the Republican obsession with TikTok is a hollow performance. This is a party that refuses to pass a useful privacy law (or to regulate data brokers). This is a party that generally couldn’t care less about widespread corruption, or its impact on national security. Yet over the last three years, the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a comment mischaracterizing a lot of what happened in the last several years: Why do you lie so transparently. It’s fucking pathetic. The Muller Special Counsel indicted 34 people: 26 Russian nationals(some, known members of the GRU), 3 Russian […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a bunch of entertainment industry lobbyists were given a chance to pay $5000 to attend the Grammys with two congressmen, an appeals court handed another loss to MP3 reseller ReDigi, and copyright lobbyists were failing to keep their story straight on the EU Copyright Directive (the problems of […]
We’ve posted about Swedish oat milk maker Oatly several times here at Techdirt and never for good reasons. The company has a reputation as a trademark bully and abuser, starting with its failed attempt to lock out rival companies from using the word “oat”, even though that is a product descriptor, as well as its […]
Qualified immunity rulings are an unqualified mess. The question doesn’t revolve around whether or not rights were violated. In most cases, they were. Instead, the question revolves around whether or not the rights violation was “clearly established.” The Supreme Court created this doctrine decades ago. And ever since then, it has been making it more […]
Half a decade ago we documented how the U.S. wireless industry was caught over-collecting sensitive user location and vast troves of behavioral data, then selling access to that data to pretty much anybody with a couple of nickels to rub together. It resulted in no limit of abuse from everybody from stalkers to law enforcement […]
In 2023, the extreme ideology of “human extinction from AI” became one of the most prominent trends. It was followed by extreme regulation proposals. As we enter 2024, let’s take a moment to reflect: How did we get here? 2022: Public release of LLMs The first big news story on LLMs (Large Language Models) can […]
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