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It’s always difficult for me to land on an overall opinion of Elon Musk’s Tesla company. On the one hand, sure, the company has been instrumental in pushing the auto industry forward on electric vehicles. Whether Tesla will dominate that space in the future is an open question, but there can’t be too much doubt […]

Yesterday we announced the inaugural Techdirt Legal Misunderstand March Madness tournament. You can still get and fill out your own tournament bracket, and tweet it at us if you’d like (though our mentions are full of so many brackets!). Anyway, the first round is now underway and Twitter voting will continue through mid-day tomorrow. You […]

Old habits die hard, even when limited by incarceration. Convicted lawyer/Prenda mastermind Paul Hansmeier apparently isn’t going to let being locked up for 14 years steer him clear of recidivism. As was reported in late 2020 by TorrentFreak, Hansmeier began filing copyright litigation from a place he certainly shouldn’t be filing lawsuits alleging illegal actions […]

We already knew that the UK’s Online Safety Bill was going to be an utter disaster for the open internet, because that had been made clear early on. Last week, the government finally unveiled the latest version of the Online Safety Bill and it’s perhaps even worse than expected. It’s 225 pages of completely misunderstanding […]

Microsoft Office is one of the most ubiquitous software in the world, used extensively in offices of all industries. If there is any business software to learn, it’s the Microsoft Office Suite. At eLearnOffice, you can use bite-sized videos and quizzes to assess and increase your skills in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, Outlook, […]

Ah, MarkMonitor. (Please, my father is “Mr. Monitor.”) MarkMonitor has plenty of clients, few of which have been served competently during its tenure at the forefront of the “War Against Piracy.” HBO cast its lot with MarkMonitor just to watch it try to take down official HBO URLs in an attempt to thwart pirates. Adobe […]

Last January DirecTV finally decided to kick fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of their satellite TV lineup, likely dooming the “news” channel. It’s a channel relatively few people watch, and the company simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so DirecTV simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement […]

Karl Bode recently wrote about Netflix’s new password sharing policy, which mostly amounts to test-running an upcharge should Netflix discover that passwords are being used “outside the home” of the subscriber. While this pilot program is only going to be run in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, Netflix’s announcement was completely silent on how it’s […]

The games have begun! Vote here! It’s that time of year — March Madness — when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had jokingly suggested on Twitter that we should set up a bracket for the most frequently misunderstood legal concepts, and people seemed […]

It still amazes me how unwilling many copyright system supporters are to admit that copyright is regularly used for actual censorship, using the power of the law to suppress speech. The latest example is particularly galling. Over the weekend, a somewhat ridiculous video went viral of a Tesla doing a jump over a hill in […]

Over the last few years we’ve seen this ongoing bizarre infatuation with “cancel culture” despite little evidence to suggest that it’s a serious issue. As we wrote nearly two years ago, in response to Harper’s trying to sound some sort of vague alarm about cancel culture, so much of the debate conflates a variety of […]

I guess ten years is long enough that Senator Pat Leahy thought everyone had forgotten about the SOPA/PIPA disaster that he was a leading reason for. Senator Leahy is on his way out of the Senate, and apparently has at least one last gift in store for Hollywood lobbyists (which includes his daughter) who make […]

The Coding 101 Bootcamp Beginners Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn how to code in many different languages. Courses cover C++, Git, Github, MongoDB, Node.js, HTML, CSS, and more. The bundle is on sale for $29. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from […]

“Who are we to judge?,” say federal court judges. That’s the questionable conclusion reached by an otherwise solid reading [PDF] of the constitutional implications of one of law enforcement’s favorite new tools: “reverse” warrants. (h/t Orin Kerr/Volokh Conspiracy) They’re called “reverse” warrants because the paperwork asks Google to turn over location info on everyone in […]

Remember when the cable and broadcast industry insisted that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV subscriptions) wasn’t actually a real trend? Or how, once they finally acknowledged it was a real thing, insisted that it was just a temporary fad that would abate once Millennials started having babies? Years later and amazingly enough the very […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side, our first place winner is MathFox with a response to Minnesota’s anti-algorithm social media bill: No algorithm means: no filtering against harassment, no filtering against violent content, no filtering of pornographic content and no filter to keep child predators out Are those Minnesota “representatives” so […]

Last week, to kick off our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we took a look at Best Adaptation winner The Wall Across The River. Today, we move on to the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: The Obstruction Method by Jason […]

Clearview AI has been disinvited from yet another country. This unrolling of the unwelcome mat also includes a hefty exit fee. (h/t Michael Vario) The Italian privacy guarantor (GPDP) has imposed a fine of €20,000,000 on Clearview AI for implementing a biometric monitoring network in Italy without acquiring people’s consent. This decision resulted from a […]

Thanks to Vladimir Putin and his one-man show designed to educate the world on just what can happen when a murderous dictator decides to throw a fit, the news is chock full of Ukraine. This has included Techdirt’s pages, which really shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. Still, I will admit that I didn’t […]

As Omar (RIP, Michael K. Williams) pointed out, using only his whistling and his sawed-off shotgun, “If you come at the king, you’d best not miss.” The “king” of First Amendment protections has always been the independent press, especially when coupled with issues of public interest that (almost always) involve government employees and officials. The […]