There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn’t, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are […]
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United […]
When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is — well, that’s not legal strategy. That’s performance art. Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the […]
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Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated. That private contractor […]
We’ve long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The “news” outlet, originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVID was created in a North Carolina […]
It was a couple of weeks ago when I was stupidly watching one cable news channel or another when I witnessed some GOP talking head say that Donald Trump likes to build a team of competing viewpoints that fight with one another as a way of producing the best results. I think it was Scott […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space. His […]
This is a cross post from Prof. Eric Goldman’s blog, mostly written by Prof. Jess Miers, with additional commentary at the end from Eric. Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the ‘Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,’’ […]
This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they’re finding out it won’t be bent quite as easy as they thought. First, let’s take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we’ve come to expect from the […]
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Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order — in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge’s orders — by talking about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, you’d think that the judge is going to go hard against the government. Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers […]
During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the […]
It’s time for yet another reminder that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an incapable leader at odds with the scientists who actually know what they’re talking about. At the CDC specifically, we recently discussed the government’s decision to do away with the team that was helping to identify, track, and remediate elevated levels of lead […]
While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the “right to repair” movement — making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own — continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair in creative and obnoxious ways. Washington State just became […]
Here we go again with the party of the “rule of law.” The rule of law doesn’t apply to the Trump Administration. It only applies to the victims of its vindictive policies. But the least it could do is get some basic facts straight before talking out of its ass about whatever new fascist scheme […]
If asked, do you think corporate America would prefer to hire (1) lawyers who fight, or (2) lawyers who immediately surrender, I think you’d know the answer. And now we have some fairly unambiguous empirical data to support what the answer is. Oracle’s Larry Ellison loves Trump. Morgan Stanley contributed one of their top execs […]
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Never give up. That’s the unofficial motto of the Republican party pretty much everywhere in the nation. No matter how many rights you violate, court decisions you lose, and public criticism you receive, always remember, you’re in the for the long haul. It is your (allegedly) God-given right to take away other people’s rights and […]
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