TechDirt 🕸

We’ve noted repeatedly how the hyperventilation about TikTok privacy is largely just a distraction from the U.S.’ ongoing failure to pass even a basic privacy law or meaningfully regulate data brokers. We haven’t done those things for two reasons. One, the dysfunctional status quo (where companies mindlessly over-collect data and fail to secure it, resulting […]

Earlier this summer, we talked about Trader Joe’s joining the list of large companies combatting unionization efforts through the most petty of methods: complaining about those unions over “trademark infringement.” Trader Joe’s isn’t the first company to go down this route of course, as we’ve seen Walmart and Medieval Times have behaved similarly. Nor will […]

This case involves both civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. First one, then the other. Not that the order matters as much as the government’s unwillingness to do much more than sit on the $30,000 in cash they took from an Ohio couple during a supposed drug investigation. Civil forfeiture allows the government to keep seized […]

Back in June, we wrote about a ridiculously weak lawsuit from the big music publishers against exTwitter, claiming that the platform, mostly known for text, and which barely has any reasonable system for posting or listening to music, was a music piracy haven. As we noted, the publishers’ lawsuit seemed misguided in multiple ways, beyond […]

I guess the feeling was that some protesters needed to be arrested. And when most protesters are protesting cops, it’s probably a whole lot easier to go after those that aren’t. That’s how this lawsuit got started. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, protests against police violence began all […]

Podurama is a leading podcast player with a collection of more than 30 million podcasts in every genre. The app makes it easy to organize your podcasts into folders or create multiple playlists of your favorite episodes. You can also take notes or bookmark within an audio. Very few podcast players have the ability to […]

Stephen Thaler has spent years trying, and almost always failing, to convince both patent and copyright bodies to give him patents and copyrights on works he says are created by AI systems he’s built. He’s failed at this process. A lot. I mean, really, a lot. His latest attempt was to sue the Copyright Office […]

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has backed off of its ill-advised opposition to right to repair after presumably getting an earful from reformers and the Biden administration. This past June, NHTSA issued guidance advising the auto industry to basically ignore Massachusetts’ new right to repair law, which required that all modern vehicle systems […]

Pretextual stops are law enforcement’s favorite way to fish for larger catches. Any minor moving violation can predicate a stop. That leads to conversations — often non-consensual — with drivers and passengers. Any number of factors can be opportunistically read by officers to add up to “reasonable suspicion.” Once that “develops,” the party begins. Cars, […]

Well, this certainly isn’t an outcome I would have predicted. While the saga of Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has certainly taken a long and winding road, as it stands today all the regulatory hurdles have seemingly been cleared save for the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). Unlike the FTC’s challenge to the […]

Clearview has suffered tons of self-inflicted damage during its relatively short life as a viable, if execrable, product. Always willing to put its worst foot forward, the company built an AI backbone to support its voluminous webscraping, gathering up everything that wasn’t locked down on the internet and applying its facial recognition algorithm to it. […]

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon’s personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it’s for “esthetic” reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just […]

As a child, nothing warmed me more than my mother’s “Three C’s Soup”: Cabbage, Carrot, Carraway from Jane Brody’s Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (published in 1980 and still in print, no ebook version has yet been licensed). And when my mother died in late fall 2018, there was nothing I wanted […]

Headway is an app that will help you develop the most powerful learning habits and make sure you’re always armed with the best book ideas, bite-sized learning for fun and easy growth, and essential knowledge to crush your goals. Whether you want to build a business, improve your health, or succeed at work, we’ve got […]

Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote an NY Times op-ed piece a few weeks ago (there’s so much nonsense all the time that it takes a little while to find the time to respond to all of it), claiming that “Algorithms are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy.” He wrote this in support of his “The Protecting […]

Having clearly not learned many lessons from the ongoing and growing repercussions for false claims of election fraud, election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell last week unveiled his new plan (see video) to “monitor” election polling places by using… drones. According to Ars Technica, Lindell claimed he’d developed a first-of-its-kind drone technology to monitor for election fraud: […]

Writing as much as I do about trademark disputes and, more specifically, lawsuits, these are always the most frustrating ways for these disputes to end. I will spend some time examining a dispute, analyzing the merits on both sides, only to find that the suit is settled without any of the pertinent details of the […]

As you’ll surely recall, Elon’s first big brilliant idea upon taking over Twitter was to conflate two separate offerings that Twitter had: Twitter Blue, a premium upsell with extra features (some of which were useful) with Twitter’s blue check verification program, which was created to help more well known users avoid impersonation. The original blue […]

For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from […]

This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media, spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies, which had innovated and created new business models that worked, to suddenly be required to pay for sending […]