This keeps coming up in different contexts, so I thought I might write a short (ha, as if I can write short things!) blog post that I can point to on various occasions. I spend a lot of time here on Techdirt highlighting why your favorite solution to (*waves hands*) some big societal problem won’t […]
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Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don’t cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations. These are long-held facts backed by years of court precedent, the most famous of which is the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision. This is the baseline for school-student interactions when it […]
Every six months or so the FCC announces it has taken some major new step to thwart annoying robocalls. Yet Americans still receive more than 4.5 billion such calls every month, the vast majority of FCC fines are never collected, scammers elude meaningful accountability, and the problem persists. Last week for example, the FCC announced […]
There’s nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren’t as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In […]
In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city’s dated pay phones with “information kiosks” providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by “context-aware” ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC […]
Cops really hate policing protests that target police. But that has been the reality since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ripped the bandage off an unhealed wound by placing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, choking the life out of him during an act that played out like an anthropomorphized […]
There’s an interesting thing that happens all too often in trademark cases, whereby people seem to flip the underlying argument. We see it in cases where someone opposes the registration of a certain trademark, and the party seeking the trademark complains that the government is trying to “censor” them or limit their speech, when more […]
There are no incentives in place to encourage accurate reporting of force deployment by law enforcement agencies. Tracking use of force means agencies are basically generating evidence for civil rights lawsuits. That’s why force reporting is, at best, inconsistent. At its worst, it’s simply dishonest. The lack of solid deterrents means agencies simply won’t generate […]
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Well this is dumb. First off, let’s just remind everyone that in a moment of pure stupidity, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff called for Section 230 to be “abolished.” Specifically, he claimed that websites “must have standards and practices decided by law” and that websites “need to be held accountable” for what users do […]
Cable executives spent years denying that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a “fiction,” or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies. Yeah, about that. Major cable companies continue […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple response to an attempt to defend Elon Musk’s reinstatement of an account that posted CSAM, on the basis of the motivations for posting: I hate to tell you this, but legally speaking the intent doesn’t matter – even if it was done […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, not long after the settlement in the Dancing Baby case, Universal was straight back to issuing DMCA takedowns, this time over a reporter’s video of Prince fans singing Purple Rain (though it didn’t take long for them to back down). Sony found itself in court after bullying a […]
Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create […]
The state of Texas was sued in a federal district court by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, and a slate of other companies including subsidiaries of Canadian firm MindGeek (owner of Pornhub). Other plaintiffs include the parent companies of popular adult sites like XVideos and Bang Bros, and […]
Ah, copyright. Eric Goldman alerts us to to a new bit of copyright nonsense. Jieun Kiaer, an Oxford professor of Korean linguistics, recently published an academic book called Emoji Speak: Communications and Behaviours on Social Media. As you can tell from the name, it’s a book about emoji, and about how people communicate with them: […]
Donald Trump can’t win consecutive elections. And he certainly can’t win lawsuits. Pretty much every bit of litigation Trump has engaged in since he was elected president has been tossed out on its proverbial ear, the completely expected outcome for lawsuits engaged in angrily, but not coherently. About a year ago, Trump’s legal team issued […]
A few weeks ago, the Progress Action Fund released a political ad in Ohio that went somewhat viral on social media. I saw one person refer to it as “the most effective political ad” they’d ever seen. And, I mean, even if you don’t agree with the message, you have to admit that (1) it […]
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