Finding real value on the blockchain

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Sheila Bair, an author and former chair of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Vicki Huff Eckert, a retired PwC US partner and former vice chair for PwC's US technology, media, and telecommunications sector, talk about how blockchain, and the cryptocurrencies that exist because of it, could affect financial systems and transform business and society--ready or not.

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How do you make life-changing ideas a reality?

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Drawing on lessons from the development of other breakthrough technologies, Ken Gabriel, the COO of Wellcome Leap and former acting director of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), talks with PwC UK's head of disruption and innovation, Leo Johnson, about the future of innovation for some of society's biggest challenges and about the crucial issue of trust.

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How to turbocharge collaboration in innovation ecosystems

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The powerful trends of digitization have transformed the way collaboration in innovation ecosystems works. IMD professor Louise Muhdi writes that in order to be successful, such collaboration must rely on new matchmakers, empower people, and focus on value creation.

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This Week In Techdirt History: October 23rd - 29th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, it was looking like the FCC would use the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday to hide its unpopular plan to kill net neutrality, while a Verizon-funded group was claiming that killing the rules would really help Puerto Rico. The DOJ subpoenaed Twitter about Popehat and others over a smiley emoji […]

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Red Bull Loses To Bullards, A Gin Maker, Over Trademark Opposition

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There must be something about being an energy drink company that turns you into a trademark bully turd sandwich. The stories about Monster Energy, for instance, are absolutely legendary and legion. Meanwhile, Red Bull, the other large player in the energy drink space, has far fewer chiding posts from us, but there are still a […]

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Can We Count The Ways In Which Elon Is Going To Regret Owning Twitter?

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Nilay Patel over at The Verge has written a fantastic article, Welcome to Hell, Elon, highlighting the many, many ways in which Elon Musk is likely going to be regretting the fact that he now owns Twitter. I will note that many of the links in the article are to some of my stories here […]

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Ohio Supreme Court Tells Cops They Can't Hide All Their Use Of Force Reports Under Investigatory Records Exemption

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Open records laws were passed because governments simply aren’t interested in voluntarily sharing their documents with the people that foot the bill for both the people and the paper. But governments have to pass these laws, in essence forcing transparency upon themselves. Since most governments seem to be more interested in opacity, massive holes in […]

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Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers

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Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, […]

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Investigation: Child Protective Services Agencies Nearly Always Blow Off Warrant Requirements To Enter Homes

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Governments set up rules governing how they govern. Then they ignore them. So, what’s the point? Is it a nod to decorum before the proverbial government party guest throws up in the bathtub and hits on your mom? If the law says an entry order or warrant is needed to enter people’s homes to investigate […]

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Unfortunately, Paying For The Public Domain Already Exists In Many Countries

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A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, […]

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Another Person Is Archiving Every English PS2 Game Manual

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A couple of years ago, we discussed the work being done, essentially by one enterprising individual going by the handle “Peebs,” to archive a bunch of retro video game manuals for the sake of preservation. Earlier this year, we updated you all with the fairly impressive news that every SNES game manual had been digitized […]

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If GitHub Copilot Is A Copyright Problem, Perhaps The Problem Is Copyright

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Last week a new GitHub Copilot investigation website created by Matthew Butterick brought the conversation about GitHub's Copilot project back to the front of mind for many people, myself included. Copilot, a tool trained on public code that is designed to auto-suggest code to programmers, has been greeted by excitement, curiosity, skepticism, and concern since it was announced. The GitHub […]

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Court: No Immunity For Cops Who Waited Months To Test Heart Shaped Candy They Claimed Were Drugs

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We know cops often can’t differentiate innocuous substances from actual drugs. These from-the-hip determinations are just the manufacturing of reasonable suspicion and probable cause, something that allows cops to perform the searches and seizures they were planning to do anyway. Whether it’s the “odor of marijuana” (something that can rarely be objectively examined in court) […]

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As Big Book Publishers Look To Kill The Internet Archive, It Introduces 'Democracy's Library'

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Last week the Internet Archive announced a new project: “Democracy’s Library.” This hits on a bunch of important topics for us here at Techdirt. First, it’s a travesty that government-funded research and publications are often hidden away, locked up and impossible to access, despite the fact that they were paid for by us, the public. […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: October 16th - 22nd

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the push was on for encryption backdoors, with the DOJ rolling out some new and even worse arguments at the hands of the new Deputy Attorney General, while the White House’s cybersecurity boss was employing the tactic of calling for backdoors while refusing to actually use the word. […]

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Black Frogs Rising: How Nature Is Dealing With Chernobyl's Radioactivity

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The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine is the largest in Europe, and one of the ten largest in the world. It’s of particular concern at the moment because it sits close to the front line between the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and has been subject to bombardment and loss of backup power. The […]

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Mississippi Courts Are Helping Cops Keep Search Warrants Out Of The Public's Hands

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No-knock warrants remain under fire as they continue to needlessly increase the death toll of residents who often have no idea who’s violently entering their home and, therefore, respond in unpredictable ways. Supposedly obtained to increase officer safety, these warrants often seem like a handy way to put officers in “fear for your safety” mode, […]

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How Do You Sue A DAO?

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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are one of the most fascinating things to emerge from the crypto space. While everyone was going crazy over NFTs, almost all of the more interesting things were happening in the DAO space. DAOs are something of an experiment in being able to form new kinds of organizations quickly in non-traditional […]

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Some Good News: Planet Aid Agrees To Pay $1.9 Million To Settle Its SLAPP Suit Against Reveal News

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Once again, we need good anti-SLAPP laws in every state and a strong federal anti-SLAPP law. It’s the best defense against vexatious, censorial lawsuits. Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting does some really good reporting, with a focus on big, important issues. Reveal wrote a series of articles about the non-profit Planet Aid. […]

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Copyright Absurdity Rules Over Amazon's 'The Rings Of Power'

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J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is one of the best-known and best-loved modern works of literature, not least thanks to Peter Jackson's films based on the cycle. Given that popularity, it's no surprise that there was interest in creating adaptations of other Tolkien works. The result is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings […]

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Louisville Cop Used Law Enforcement Database To Seek Female Targets To Hack For Sexually Explicit Content

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Law enforcement officers have plenty of unfettered access to expansive databases containing plenty of personal information. This access is instrumental to law enforcement work, including ongoing investigations, attempts to locate wanted criminals, and the routine minutia of validating drivers licenses and registration. The problem is there’s so little oversight of officers’ use of these databases. […]

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U.S. Utilities Are Poised To Disrupt Telecom Monopolies Thanks To Biden COVID Relief & Infrastructure Bills

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As noted previously, I’ve got some mixed feelings on the Biden COVID relief and infrastructure bills’ plan to throw more than $50 billion dollars at U.S. broadband. Mostly because we still haven’t mapped U.S. broadband properly (meaning we don’t know where money should be prioritized), and the U.S. has a rich history of failing to […]

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DC Taxpayers Are Spending Millions To Rehire Bad Cops

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Late last year, a trove of records was obtained by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secret (DDoS). Those records showed what the Washington DC Metro PD hoped to hide: that the internal disciplinary process was apparently irreparably broken. The joint report by DCist and The Reveal made sense of the DDoS-liberated data. What it showed […]

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Survey Says More Than Half Of Households With LAPD Officers Support Dismantling The LAPD

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Ever since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, there has been a lot of discussion about dismantling or defunding police departments. Some of this discussion occurred at the flashpoint. But it wasn’t limited to Minneapolis. Efforts to limit the damage caused by law enforcement by, say, farming out mental health calls to health care […]

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Medieval Times Tries To Bully Its Workers Out Of Unionizing With A Bullshit Trademark Lawsuit

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Trademark bullying usually takes a pretty typical form. Someone with a trademark decides to interpret the need to enforce their mark in an extreme way and goes off threatening and/or suing everyone that even comes mildly close to using the registered trademark. It’s annoying, although perhaps mildly understandable if you squint your eyes just right. […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: October 9th - 15th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, a proposed bill would have exempted Customs and Border Protection from FOIA compliance until reporting on the issue got the problem fixed, the DOJ was fighting against a FOIA lawsuit and arguing that not even the courts have any right to question the administration’s handling of records, and […]

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Kentucky Judge Streisands Story About Him Failing To Wear Pants At Work Into Wide Coverage

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For obvious reasons, we’ve covered a metric ton of Streisand Effect stories here at Techdirt over the years, but I honestly didn’t think we’d get to one about a judge not wearing pants. Yet, unfortunately, here we are. Meet Judge Jamie Jameson, of the 42nd Judicial Circuit court in Kentucky. Jameson is currently suspended from […]

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Chicago Sun-Times Kills Its Paywall; Makes Its Content Free For Everyone

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Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news […]

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Seattle Times, Brands Complain Over Senate Campaign Ad That Is Clearly Protected Speech

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There is something about when corporate brands get used in political advertisements that seems to make everybody forget about the very concept of fair use or international equivalents. One previous example would be when a bunch of foodstuff brands claimed trademark infringement over an anti-littering campaign in Canada, arguing that the use of their own […]

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An (Im)perfect Way Forward On Infrastructure Moderation?

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Within every conversation about technology lies the moral question: is a technology good or bad? Or, is it neutral? In other words, are our values part of the technologies we create or is technology valueless until someone decides what to do? This is the kind of dilemma Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company, found itself in […]

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US Federal Courts Agree To Refund Fees They Overcharged People For Access To PACER

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You may recall that, back in 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the US federal judiciary and how it charges for PACER. If you don’t know, PACER is the court system’s electronic filing/records system, that allows users to access documents in federal court. It looks and acts like it was designed in the 1990s, and […]

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Valve Briefly (Accidentally?) Shows Off Steam Deck's Useful Ability To Use Emulators

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Buckle in, because there are essentially two ways to write this post but both of them start off the same way. Regular readers here will be familiar with Nintendo’s now years-long war on emulation. The whole thing is ultimately quite stupid, because there is no indication that emulator and ROM sites ever really had a […]

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Justice Department Files Disgusting Attack On Journalist Jason Leopold For Being Good At His Job

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We’ve been writing about journalist Jason Leopold for many years, either focused on his FOIA adventures or the amazing (and important) scoops he achieves through them. If you look back through our archives, you’ll see that Leopold knows how to use freedom of information laws basically better than anyone, and thus wields them effectively to […]

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Oatly Attempted To Trademark 'Barista' In New Zealand But Lost After Opposition

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It seems that trademark shenanigans are becoming something of a corporate tradition for the folks over at Oatly. The Swedish oat-milk maker, backed by several celebrities, last made it onto our pages first for suing another oat-milk producer essentially for having the word “oat” in its brand name… and then for losing that lawsuit because […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: October 2nd - 8th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, ISPs were ignoring the death of “six strikes” and still threatening to disconnect accused pirates, and also taking their third shot at getting the Supreme Court to kill net neutrality, while broadband lobbyists were gushing over the re-appointment of Ajit Pai, who was himself busy blasting Apple for […]

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Vietnamese Government Pushes Plan To Restrict Dissemination Of News Stories By Social Media Platforms

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Every unhappy populace is unhappy in its own way, but every autocratic regime is the same. Vietnam may have embraced a form of capitalism that made it inviting to foreigners, but the government’s embrace has always been a bit on the strangulation side. Sure, Vietnam citizens may have more opportunities for earning money than running […]

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'Matter' Standard Hopes To Clean Up The Messy Smart Home Space

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If you've ever tried to build a smart home you've probably run face first into no shortage of problems. Gear is expensive, overly complicated, and more often than not different devices don't play well together. It's a sector filled with various walled gardens by gatekeepers looking to lock you into one ecosystem, placing the onus […]

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There Are All Sorts Of Problems With Ruling That YouTube Ripping Tool May Violate Copyright Law

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There are a number of different tools out there that let you download YouTube videos. These tools are incredibly useful for a number of reasons and should be seen as obviously legal in the same manner that home video recording devices were declared legal by the Supreme Court, because they have substantial non-infringing uses. But, […]

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Authentic Brands Group Behind Another Silly Parent, Child Trademark Dispute

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We’ve talked about Authentic Brands Group here a couple of times and never for good behavior. The company that manages the rights for several living and deceased celebrities is also a notorious trademark troll and enforcer. Most recently we discussed a bizarre trademark opposition brought against Shaqir O’Neal, Shaq’s son, who had the trademark application […]

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Book Publishing Giant Pulls Nearly 1400 Ebook Titles From GW Library; Forcing Students To Buy Them Instead

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It is difficult to understate how downright evil the big book publishers are. If you think the RIAA and MPA are bad (and, they are), the book publishers take it to new super villain, mustache-twirling levels. George Washington University libraries have put out an alert to students and faculty that Wiley, one of the largest […]

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Court Strips Immunity From Cop Who Shot A Dog Within Seconds Of Arriving On The Scene Of A Non-Crime

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Cops kill dogs literally all the time. It happens so often even the DOJ has taken notice. Laurel Matthews, a supervisory program specialist with the Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services (DOJ COPS) office, says it's an awful lot. She calls fatal police vs. dogs encounters an epidemic and estimates that 25 to 30 […]

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Techdirt Podcast Episode 322: Celebrating 25 Years Of Techdirt

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As you probably already know, Techdirt recently marked its 25th anniversary and celebrated the occasion with an online party for our Insider subscribers. At the event, Mike was joined by Techdirt co-founder Dennis Yang for an interview conducted by Alex Feerst of Murmuration Labs, in which they looked back on the history of the site […]

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UK Taqueira Under Trademark Threat Gets 100k People Worth Of Public Support

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You will hopefully recall our recent discussion about a taco restaurant, or taqueria, in the UK being bullied by Worldwide Taqueria because the latter had somehow gotten a trademark on the word “taqueria.” As we pointed out in the original post on the topic, everything about this is ridiculous. First, it’s absurd that the company […]

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'Central Park Karen' Loses Defamation Suit Against Employer That Fired Her Following Viral Video Of Her Calling Cops On A Black Birdwatcher

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The long saga of one of the most infamous internet “Karens” has come to a close as New York City resident Amy Cooper, a.k.a. “Central Park Karen,” has lost her defamation lawsuit against her former employer. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy) The same day unarmed black man George Floyd was being murdered by a white police officer, […]

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Lazy-Ass House GOP Uses Foreign Stock Photos In Video About America

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I get that stock photos are a thing and that political campaigns or teams may be pressed for time, but some things really shouldn’t be so hard. If you follow politics, you may be aware that House Republicans, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, unveiled an agenda for 2023 politics it’s calling “Commitment to America.” […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: September 25th - October 1st

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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the SESTA fight continued, and we took a look at how Google would survive the law, but startups might not, and how much of the supposed sex trafficking epidemic driving the bill simply didn’t exist. Ajit Pai’s FCC amusingly declared victory over wireless competition issues, the streaming exclusivity […]

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Appeals Court Tells Cops Their Inability To Read A Temporary Plate Cannot Justify A Traffic Stop

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Pretextual stops are an unfortunate side effect of American law enforcement. When cops want to question people or root around in their cars, they’ll find another reason to make the stop and hope the eventual searches make it all worthwhile. This law enforcement activity has been repeatedly blessed by courts, which tend to view it […]

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After Trying To Deny The Obvious, Google Announces It's Shutting Down Stadia

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While Google's Stadia game streaming service arrived with a lot of promise, it generally landed with a disappointing thud. A limited catalog, deployment issues, and a quality that couldn't match current gen game consoles meant the service just never saw the kind of traction Google (or a lot of other people) originally envisioned. Developers have been […]

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