It’s simply not enough to be part of one problem. The DEA feels the need to be part of several problems. You’d think it would have its hands full blowing billions of dollars on a lost drug war and filling people’s heads with hysterical stupidity about the magical powers of fentanyl. But, as FOIA terrorist […]
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There’s been this weird idea lately, even among people who used to recognize that copyright only empowers the largest gatekeepers, that in the AI world we have to magically flip the script on copyright and use it as a tool to get AI companies to pay for the material they train on. But, as we’ve […]
Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there’s been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app maker over-collecting your detailed personal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information to any nitwit with a nickel. And despite the added risks this creates in the post-Roe era, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous response to the claim that Elon Musk fights censorship: Remember when Elon happily complied with the Turkish government’s request to censor anti-Erdogan content during its presidential election? In second place, it’s a double-winning comment from Thad that also takes first place […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, consumer groups accused the FCC of weakening oversight of cell carriers under the pretense of battling text message spam, activists were making one last push to restore net neutrality via the Congressional Review Act, and senators were continuing to point out that US broadband maps suck. The FBI […]
Law enforcement for profit is an ugly proposition. Most of us immediately think of civil asset forfeiture, which is generally just cops going shopping for stuff they want or cash to buy the stuff they want that isn’t subject to outside oversight. But there’s another undercurrent of corruption that runs through small town America — […]
Hormel, the foodstuffs company that makes Spam, amongst other items, has made it onto our pages before. And not for good reasons. Ages ago, the company attempted to sue anti-spam proprietors, arguing that its “Spam” trademark somehow translated into the world of IT and email. Separately, the company also bullied a Canadian brewery into changing […]
We’ve long known the Fifth Circuit is the worst circuit to hear your case involving rights violations by law enforcement. Despite one particularly blistering dissent from Judge Don Willett calling qualified immunity a “rigged game” litigants almost always lose, the Fifth Circuit continues to coddle cops and overreaching government officials to give them what they […]
This wasn’t hard to predict. When Montana passed its TikTok ban in April we called it “laughably unconstitutional.” Montana’s very silly Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, who claimed to have been the driving force behind the bill, had insisted that the state would be vindicated in court. As we noted when the bill passed, his public […]
Most people seem to understand the First Amendment protects their right to say stupid or offensive things, especially when they’re the ones saying them. These same people often forget the First Amendment does not protect them from counter-speech, during which they may be publicly decried as stupid or offensive. The same goes for most government […]
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Okay, okay, I think this is the last of my posts about Elon Musk’s unhinged appearance at the DealBook Summit with ill-prepared interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. We already covered his cursing out advertisers, while predicting that “earth will judge” them, as well as his statement that AI copyright lawsuits don’t matter because “Digital God” will […]
For decades, cable TV giants have nickel-and-dimed customers with a rotating assortment of bullshit cable TV fees, whether it’s “regulatory recovery” fee (a misleadingly named fee designed to have you blaming government for industry greed), regional sports fees (charged whether or not you watch sports), or the completely meaningless “broadcast TV fee” (which has ballooned […]
One of the more famous, and my favorite, quotations attributed to Winston Churchill is: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” My second favorite Churchill quote, by the way, is: “Dammit, I can’t decide between these three fingers of whiskey and this tankard of champagne!” Anyway, the point […]
One of things we enjoy here at Techdirt is when even those with legitimate gripes about trademark law take a bemused view about the whole thing, rather than immediately jumping to angry and overly aggressive threats. No one likes a trademark bully, even when the trademark holder might have a legitimate claim. A few weeks […]
A few months ago a California court of appeals issued a really terrible decision in Liapes v. Facebook. Liapes, a Facebook user, was unhappy that the ads delivered to her correlated with some of her characteristics, like her age. As a result there were certain ads, like one provided by an insurer offering a particular […]
The Stored Communications Act — enacted in 1986 — is not only outdated, it’s also pretty weird. An amendment to the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), the SCA added and subtracted privacy from communications. It’s the subtractions that are bothersome. Law enforcement wasn’t too happy a lot of electronic communications were now subject to warrant […]
So, we already wrote about the biggest headline grabbing moment from Elon Musk’s Dealbook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin yesterday, but there was another crazy, Techdirt-relevant one involving copyright and AI. As we’ve explained over and over again, copyright is the wrong tool to use to regulate AI, and using it will lead to bad […]
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