This Week In Techdirt History: July 24th - 30th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Senator Wyden was seeking answers about how many times Americans have been targeted by one of the least-discussed NSA surveillance programs, while we noted the silence from tech companies as the clock ticked down on Section 702 renewal (while newly released documents showed even more violations by the […]

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Rapper IDK Calls Out Popeyes Over Trademark Because He's Trademark Illiterate

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I’ll preface this post with this short bit of throat-clearing: no writer or reader of this site should expect the average person on the street to understand the nuances of intellectual property at the same level of those of us interested in the topic. The law is complicated and nuanced, and the layperson is simply […]

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Training And Expertise: Denver Cops Hit Five Bystanders While Shooting At 'Felony Menacing' Suspect

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Sometimes you’ve got to shoot a few civilians to make the public safe. (h/t Maggie McNeill) More often than not, police do not stop a mass shooting. In Denver over the weekend, they actually started one. According to the Denver Post, police in the Lower Downtown area opened fire to stop a man who allegedly pulled a […]

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Kansas Police Officer Who Killed Innocent Man During A Swatting Denied Qualified Immunity

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Swatting is truly heinous. People angry about video game playing somehow believe they’re justified in attempting to end their opponents’ lives, literally. Toxic sub-humans who can’t handle losing turn to secondhand killing to get their revenge. Absolutely abhorrent behavior that plays into law enforcement’s shoot-first, handcuff-the-corpse-later warrior mentality. In this case, originating in a Wichita, […]

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The NFL's New Streaming Offering Kind Of Sucks Thanks To Legacy Broadcasting Rights

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I’ve spilled many words on these pages talking about the outsized importance live sports has on the adoption of streaming as a primary entertainment platform compared with traditional cable. While cord-cutting is very much a thing, the vine that terrestrial cable is clinging to keeping it all from falling over the cliff remains live sports. […]

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University Of Chicago Researchers Think They've Built A Better Pre-Crime Mousetrap

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Here are just two of the many things the Securities and Exchange Commission forbids investment companies from putting in their marketing literature: (B) Representations implying that future gain or income may be inferred from or predicted based on past investment performance; or (C) Portrayals of past performance, made in a manner which would imply that gains or […]

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Girl Scouts Settle Trademark Suit With Scouts BSA

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For roughly the past four years, we have been following the trademark lawsuit brought by the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) against Scouts BSA, formerly the Boy Scouts of America. While these two organizations coexisted peacefully for many years thanks to BSA’s “girls have cooties” viewpoint, that changed when BSA suddenly started allowing girls to […]

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Why Meta's Project To Translate Automatically Between 200 Languages Will Be Stymied By Copyright

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Meta's AI division has announced two exciting new projects in the field of machine translation: The first is No Language Left Behind, where we are building a new advanced AI model that can learn from languages with fewer examples to train from, and we will use it to enable expert-quality translations in hundreds of languages, ranging from […]

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Supreme Court Asked To Deny Qualified Immunity To County Engineer Who Decided Entrapment Was The Best Use Of Taxpayer Money

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We all know this country is capable of evils normally associated with authoritarian regimes — things like torture, illegal spying, the occasional exhortation to commit suicide, etc. But we expect the country we love to only violate our sense of justice for big things: War on Terror, War on Drugs, War on… Equal Rights, I […]

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Fifth Circuit Tells Cops 'Hispanic On A Bike' Isn't Enough Suspicion To Justify Stops Of Hispanics On Bikes

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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tends to be the cop-friendliest jurisdiction. Unexpected outbursts by recently appointed Judge Don Willett aside, the Fifth Circuit tends to maintain the law enforcement status quo. It has held this line so frequently even the Supreme Court — which made qualified immunity the mess it is today — has […]

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Why Is Media Lamenting Disney's 'Loss' Of Copyright Instead Of Celebrating The Public Domain?

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There’s something odd going on in media reporting on the expiration of Disney’s copyright on the initial version of Mickey Mouse that is set to occur in 2024. Given the subject matter, we’ve talked Mickey Mouse quite a bit on this site, specifically noting the “coincidence” of copyright term extensions that have occurred roughly each […]

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Phishing Attacks On WordPress Site Owners Disguised As Copyright Infringement Warnings

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Last year, we discussed how malicious actors on the internet were using fake copyright infringement notices in order to get people to click links that downloaded malware onto their machines. While there have long been these sorts of malware scams, what was notable about this one was that copyright culture and the fear of infringement […]

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US Defense Contractor L3Harris Drops Plan To Buy NSO Group Despite Allegedly Having The Defense Department's Backing

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A couple of weeks ago, news leaked of a match made in hell: the acquisition of toxic asset/exploit developer NSO Group by defense contractor L3Harris. The “Harris” part of the contractor’s name refers to none other than Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of Stingray cell tower spoofers and an entity that often found itself described as […]

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With The Hype Bubble Burst, Companies Try Comically Hard To Distance Themselves From NFTs

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There’s surely some utility buried somewhere underneath the monumental piles of bullshit, hype, and outright scams. But with cryptocurrency values tanking and the public losing interest, the NFT craze appears to be retreating just as quickly as it arrived. That’s bad news for the numerous companies that — after bumbling through the bureaucratic process of […]

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Facebook Is So Sure Its Erroneous Blocking Of Music Is Right, There's No Option To Say It's Wrong

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It's hardly a secret that upload filters don't work well. Back in 2017, Felix Reda, then Shadow Rapporteur on the EU Copyright Directive in the European Parliament, put together a representative sample of the many different ways in which filters fail. A recent series of tweets by Markus Pssel, Senior Outreach Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, […]

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As The Chinese Government Ramps Up Oppression, Citizens Are Pushing Back

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The Chinese government often seems like an unstoppable force of evil. Perhaps the word “seems” needs to be removed from the previous sentence. The government seems all too capable of keeping a few billion people in line, strongly suggesting it has obtained the oppression cheat codes. But there are still signs of life. Residents of […]

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Omnipresent Fentanyl Copaganda Is Turning Normal Citizens Into Fainting Goats

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For a few years now, uninformed police officials have been making America stupider by pushing the narrative that fentanyl is so dangerous, simply being near it is possibly fatal. Ignoring the fact that drugs must be ingested in some form to do what they’re supposed to do, law enforcement agencies have repeatedly made absurd, completely […]

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Bakery Sues Other Bakery In Trademark Suit Over Unprotectable Elements

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

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

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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 turnwhether they be medical, social, legal, economic, or geopoliticalthere is magic in transposing the spirit of a global free and open internet […]

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

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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 […]

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More Issues With Copyright Enforcement At Scale: YouTube Reinstates Videos After False Claims

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It’s no secret that Techdirt believes YouTube’s copyright enforcement program is an absolute mess. On the one hand, it’s difficult to be too hard on the company. After all, it is trying to figure out how to enforce draconian copyright laws in countries like America at a scale that is absolutely absurd. On the other […]

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

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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 […]

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Ubisoft Teaches Customers They Don't Own All That DLC They 'Bought'

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While we were just discussing how everyone occasionally gets reminded that for many digital goods these days you simply don’t actually own what you’ve bought, all thanks to Sony disappearing a bunch of purchased movies and shows from its PlayStation platform, this conversation has been going on for a long, long time. Whereas the expectation […]

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Court Denies Immunity To Child Protection Workers Who Allowed An NYPD Officer To Abuse His Son To Death

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The public expects cops to be better people than they are. Maybe they have the same weaknesses but having the training and experience to overcome them. But when you’re a cop, you’re encouraged to turn interactions into altercations and solve most problems with violence. And when all else fails, you can always just lock someone […]

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Scaling Content Moderation Is Impossible: YouTube Flags Horror Video As 'For Kids'

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Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem strikes again! The idea put forth by Mike is that the moment a platform really starts to scale upward, doing any actual content moderation well becomes inherently impossible. There are a ton of examples of this, as some reasons as to why it’s so difficult. The spoiler alert on this is that […]

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Vallejo PD Takes So Long To Investigate Officers, They Often Kill Again Before Their First Investigations Are Closed

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The Vallejo PD kills people. That’s an undeniable fact. It does so with alarming frequency, considering the size of its force. Between 2010 and 2020, the PD’s officers killed 19 people. But the PD is uninterested in reducing the number of times its officers kill. Vallejo police have killed 19 people since 2010, renewing calls […]

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Take-Two's War On Its Own Modding Community Continues, Harming Take-Two

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Over the past couple of years, we’ve discussed several battles in the war on the modding community Take-Two and Rockstar Games launched. I’ve never seen a coherent explanation for why this war was needed at all, from either the publishers or speculators. Almost without warning, Take-Two went on a DMCA blitz on sites hosting these […]

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FBI's Crime Data Collection Still Being Stymied By Major Police Departments Not Reporting Crime Stats

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The FBI has switched to a new crime reporting system to collect crime data from all over the nation. Despite being given a long runway (the 2021 switch was announced in 2015), the FBI is still seeing an incredible lack of contribution. The new system is more granular, eliminating the past reduction of crime reporting […]

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Sixth Circuit Says All Animals Are Equal, But Cop Animals Are More Equal Than Others

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Cops kill pets. This is an inarguable fact. None other than the US Department of Justice has declared the (unofficial) War on Dogs to be a law enforcement epidemic. If a cop encounters a family dog while doing cop stuff, chances are the dog is going to die. Sure, some people may claim cops encounter […]

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After Years Of Being Called An IP 'Thief,' China Now Out-Patenting Others And Suing

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It amazes me that the narrative is still out there about how China is an “intellectual property thief” and that the US and other western nations need to “convince China to respect intellectual property.” We heard that for decades, but for over a decade now, we’ve been pointing out that China responded to all that […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: July 3rd - 9th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NSA was continuing to dodge questions about “incidental collection” while trying to get one of its surveillance programs back, and Twitter got to move forward in its First Amendment lawsuit over NSL reporting limitations. The House Appropriation Committee demolished Hollywood’s arguments for moving the Copyright Office out […]

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Musk's Attempt To Get Out Of The Twitter Deal Proceeding Exactly As Predicted; What Happens Next?

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In news that is not surprising at all, and seems to be playing out just as people predicted a month ago, Elon Musk has officially claimed that Twitter is in breach of its merger agreement and says he’s pulling out of the deal. The actual details, of course, are not that simple. There is no […]

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If It's Impossible To Compete With Google, How Come New Search Engines Keep Launching?

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We’re talking a lot these days about competition and antitrust, and the narrative over the past few years is that four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — have basically sewn up the entire internet market, and no new entrants can ever succeed. Of course, we keep seeing that argument challenged by reality. First […]

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Jury Says Texas City Must Pay Woman $60k After Cops Destroyed Her Home To Apprehend A Suspect

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Bucking a trend set by two separate Appeals Courts (Ninth and Tenth), a federal court in Texas has said it is actually a violation of rights when cops destroy an innocent person’s home to effect an arrest. What’s more, a jury has backed up that decision with actual compensation. (h/t The Honest Courtesan) Today, a […]

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Russia's Other War - Against A Free And Open Internet

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Ten years ago, Techdirt was one of the few sites to be following closely some obscure but important machinations at the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the Internet. The fact that the two main proponents of this move were Russia and China gives an idea of the underlying […]

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Project To Digitize Every SNES Game Manual Now Complete

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Nearly two years ago, we discussed a fascinating project spearheaded by one dedicated person, going by the moniker Peebs, to digitize every video game manual’s English version for the Super Nintendo system. For those of you not of a certain age, video games used to come in the form of cartridges that you would load […]

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Connecticut Is Now The First State To Make Calls From Prisons Free For Inmates

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Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population. You can be pressed into service, providing nearly free labor […]

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Court Says Homeless Man Beaten By Firefighter Can Continue To Sue City For Ignoring First Responder Misconduct

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This isn’t the kind of response one expects from a firefighter arriving at the scene of a fire. (via Courthouse News Service) In August 2019 [Brad] Cox and other DFD [Dallas Fire Rescue Department] personnel were called to extinguish a grass fire. When Cox and other DFD personnel arrived, [Kyle] Vess, who is mentally ill, […]

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What Exactly Is Plagiarism Online? And Does It Really Matter Anyway?

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There's a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok. It gives the following advice: Find somebody else's TikTok that inspires you and then literally copy it. You don't need to copy it […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: June 26th - July 2nd

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Zillow got very angry about the McMansion Hell blog and sent a ridiculous legal threat, then followed up with a second equally wrong letter, then finally kinda-sorta backed down a little bit after the EFF got involved. The copyright office was recognizing that the DMCA is a problem […]

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U.S. Appeals Court: Amazon Has To Go To Trial To See If Public Will Confuse Fire TV Streaming With Porn

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Sigh, here we go. Back in 2014, Wreal LLC filed a trademark infringement suit against Amazon. Why? Well, Wreal has a product called FyreTV that it describes as “the Netflix of porn.” Amazon has a streaming service for decidedly non-pornographic content called Fire TV. Wreal came into court armed with a couple of social media […]

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Court To Litigants: A City Taking Down Its Own Statue Doesn't Violate Your First Amendment Rights

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Some days, it has got to suck to be a judge. Well, actually a lot of days. Most judicial work is tedious, including contractual disputes or bankruptcy proceedings or maritime law or any dozens of other aspects of litigation that would put most people to sleep. On other days though, it’s a particular kind of […]

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Google Gives In To Republican Political Spammers: Launching Pilot Program To Whitelist Them Out Of Spam

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What a dumb news cycle. As we noted, mainly driven by the preferred political spam mongers for Republicans, a study from some computer scientists was completely misrepresented to argue (falsely) that Google was deliberately censoring Republican politician emails. As we’ve repeatedly noted, the study actually found that while a clean Gmail account would flag more […]

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Parody Post About Nintendo's IP Bullying Hits All The Right Notes

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When I repeatedly use Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag, it pisses off some of the company’s loyal fans. This has never made sense to me. Those fans should be pissed at Nintendo and all the different avenues the company takes just to make sure being a Nintendo fan is as difficult as […]

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