Walled Culture has been warning about the financialization and securitization of music for two years now. Those obscure but important developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from the creative production process. They regard music as just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property, to be exploited to the maximum. A Guest Essay in the New […]
There’s no shortage of prognostication about the future of generative AI, including plenty of predictions that it won’t actually be around forever for various reasons. A lot of these takes are a little too speculative or just not very interesting, but one that stands out comes from law professor and returning podcast guest Eric Goldman, […]
You may recall last month’s hilarious story of lawyer Mike Dunford’s response to a vexatious angry demand letter from IMG, representing the LAPD Foundation, claiming that a t-shirt with the following “Fuck the LAPD” logo violated its IP rights: The response was as simple as it was direct: Lol, no. As we highlighted in our […]
Flock Safety wants in on the law enforcement surveillance action. It began making inroads by appealing to the next best fascists: homeowners associations. Pitching its ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) to gated communities, Flock promises a crime-free future its pseudo-research can’t back up. Not that any of that mattered to any of these suburban authoritarians. […]
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Former FCC Chair Ajit Pai seems to have forgotten the First Amendment in his rush to support the TikTok ban. In a recent Fox Business interview, Pai stumbled through a series of perplexing statements, leaving us wondering if he’s ever actually read the bill he’s defending. And look, we’ve criticized Pai a lot here on […]
One of the primary reasons U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for mobile data is because U.S. regulators — from both parties — routinely sign off on “growth for growth’s sake” mergers that reduce competition, lower product quality, raise prices, and trigger waves upon waves of layoffs. Usually under […]
We may not have Supreme Court precedent (yet!), but a number of cases handled by appellate circuits all over the nation have made it resoundingly clear: there’s a First Amendment right to film police officers. Of course, lawmakers caping for cops have done their best to make this act more difficult. Multiple attempts have been […]
Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’ve likely caught wind of a rap beef that has taken the internet by storm. I won’t pretend to be enough of a pop culture expert to have any idea why both Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been lobbing frequent shots at each other in the form […]
There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was […]
There was more contention than usual prior to the most recent reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance powers. The blame for the multiple fights leading up to a clean renewal lies entirely at the feet of the FBI, which has constantly abused its access to NSA collections to perform warrantless searches targeting US persons’ communications. Normally, […]
The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]
Section 230, the legal backbone of the internet, is under attack again. This time, it is from a bipartisan pair of legislators who seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the law works and what the consequences of repealing it would be. We’ve talked about plenty of attempts to reform Section 230, and why all of them […]
Long before TikTok histrionics took root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson, with a comment on our post about ChatGPT and privacy rights in Europe, specifically in response to someone who raised the issue of “false light” torts: False light is a privacy tort in the US. We’re talking about Europe. But also, false light […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, there was a legal fight over whether it’s protected speech to flash your headlights to warn of hidden cops. We looked at how little the FCC had done to police wireless location data scandals, and how it was doubling down on bogus claims about broadband availability, as well […]
Here we go again. Back in February, the FTC wanted to dive back into its battle with Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to Microsoft announcing thousands of jobs worth of layoffs, including many developers from Activision Blizzard. When the FTC had asked for an injunction to block the sale, Microsoft made two […]
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 round-up of the latest news in online […]
Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of a global trend over more than a decade to restrict phone use in schools. Australian governments say banning mobile phones will reduce distractions in class, allow students to focus on learning, improve student wellbeing and reduce cyberbullying. But previous research has […]
No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it’s often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law. And so it is here, where we’re dealing with a sex offender who tried to […]
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