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Bakery Sues Other Bakery In Trademark Suit Over Unprotectable Elements

2 years 11 months ago
There are a great many things that tend to annoy me about the sorts of trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt. Overly aggressive parties policing trademarks in ways that extend far beyond the reasonable. A USPTO that seems all too happy to grant trademarks for things that it simply shouldn’t have, causing all kinds […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

Florida Judge Dissolves Injunction Blocking Paper From Publishing Names Of Officers Who Killed A Man

2 years 11 months ago
About a week ago, a Florida judge decided a local law superseded the First Amendment. The judge granted an injunction to law enforcement officers, barring a Florida newspaper from publishing their names. The names were of public interest. The officers, deputies for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, had arrived at an apartment to serve an […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

Techdirt Podcast Episode 326: Broadband Competition Is Just A Click Away

2 years 11 months ago
Yesterday, we released a new report from the Copia Institute, written by Karl Bode, about the state of broadband competition and the great potential of an open access fiber model: Just A Click Away: Broadband Competition In America. On today’s episode, Karl joins the podcast to dig into the details of the report and explain […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

Twitter Wins Round One: Trial Over Musk Purchase Will Happen This Fall

2 years 11 months ago
Things move fast in the Delaware Chancery Court and if you blink, you just might miss it. A week and a half ago, you’ll recall, Musk sought to terminate the deal using the exact pretextual excuses most of us assumed he would be using, and which he telegraphed in his letter to Twitter. Days later, […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

California’s Social Media Bill Flies In The Face Of The First Amendment

2 years 11 months ago
California has officially joined the growing list of states attempting to regulate how social media companies run their platforms. The state’s proposed legislation, however, faces a major legal obstacle: the Constitution. California lawmakers are marching ahead with AB 2408, the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act. On June 28, the Judiciary Committee unanimously passed […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Lenovo Chromebook N22-20 (Refurbished)

2 years 11 months ago
Whether you’re checking emails or watching a great movie, the Lenovo N22 Chromebook delivers enhanced browsing and streaming. Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Celeron dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM, the N22 can handle multitasking and everyday computing needs. If you need more processing power, the CPU can achieve a burst speed of 2.16 GHz. […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Supposed Terrorist Gets 20 Years In Prison For Uploading A Bomb-Making Video An FBI Agent Made For Him

2 years 11 months ago
The FBI’s shift from law enforcement to counter-terrorism began shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, but really took off about a decade later, when it got into the business of radicalizing internet randos to turn them into “terrorists” worth hitting with material support charges. While the FBI continued to pretend it was making the […]
Tim Cushing

Democrats Hope To Gotcha The GOP With Doomed New Net Neutrality Bill

2 years 11 months ago
As we’ve long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history. The rules, which imposed some very modest restrictions on giant telecom monopolies to prevent them from abusing market power, were very popular among consumers of all political stripes. […]
Karl Bode

The Metaverse Could Change The World, If We Could Stop Getting In Its Way

2 years 11 months ago
Beyond the overproduced marketing videos and janky product prototypes closely associated today with “the metaverse” lies a bright and boundless future. In a pandemic-stricken world that imposes more and stronger barriers at every turn—whether they be medical, social, legal, economic, or geopolitical—there is magic in transposing the spirit of a global free and open internet […]
Mike Masnick

Federal Court Allows Protesters’ First Amendment Suit Against Violent Boston Cops To Continue

2 years 11 months ago
A lawsuit filed by four protesters against three Boston police officers can move forward, following a federal judge’s determination that the cops’ counterarguments were too ridiculous to be granted credence. The plaintiffs were participating in one of thousands of protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white […]
Tim Cushing

Ring: Cops Can Still Obtain Recordings Without Warrants Or User Consent

2 years 11 months ago
Welcome back to the negative news cycle, Ring! It’s been awhile. Ring has spent years cultivating so-close-they’re-incestuous relationships with law enforcement agencies. Ring hands out free/cheap cameras to cop shops, asking in return that they hand them out to the townsfolk and nudge them towards sharing footage via Ring’s own highly problematic social media platform, […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The 2022 Complete Arduino Pioneer Starter Kit And Course Bundle

2 years 11 months ago
Get started in the exciting world of electronics with this complete Arduino Uno compatible starter kit. It’s specifically designed for those new to electronics and the Arduino Uno ecosystem. It has everything you need to learn about electronics and comes with FUN projects you can build right out of the box. It’s on sale for […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Just A Click Away: How To Improve Broadband Competition

2 years 11 months ago
Read our new report on broadband competition in America » We’re excited today to release the Copia Institute’s latest report, written by Karl Bode, on the benefits of an open access fiber model to enable much more widespread competition in the broadband space. As I’m sure you know, for huge parts of the US, there […]
Mike Masnick

U.S. Consumers Pay $1,600 Annually For Cable TV Channels They Don’t Watch

2 years 11 months ago
One of the reasons that propaganda mills like Fox News don’t take a bigger hit from advertising boycotts is because U.S. consumers pay billions of dollars annually for the channel, even if they don’t watch it. More specifically, Fox rakes in $1.8 billion in carriage fees to include the channel in bloated cable bundles, despite […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 years 11 months ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the GOP’s push to force Google to stop filtering political spam: This sounds like great idea if you’re a malware spammer – just dress up your payload delivery like a political email to get straight in everyone’s inbox, and […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

This Week In Techdirt History: July 10th – 16th

2 years 11 months ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, as a new study shed more light on America’s terrible broadband access situation, many people were gearing up for a day of protest in support of net neutrality. After long being holdouts, Facebook and Google finally joined, followed by the laughable move of AT&T getting on board, though […]
conciergecli@a8c.com

Student Expelled Over Off-Campus Nazi Joke Can Continue To Sue The School, Says Appeals Court

2 years 11 months ago
Another school has learned it can’t discipline students for off-campus behavior, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s “fuck cheer” decision. Teens do stupid things. Sometimes they do them at school and the school is free to punish them. Sometimes they do them elsewhere and that’s where the limits kick in. That’s what the Cherry […]
conciergecli@a8c.com