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

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Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we announced one of our most exciting and unusual projects: a Kickstarter to fund the production and release of a training card game developed by the CIA and uncovered via FOIA. We were blown away by the response when we hit our goal in 40 hours, and we’re […]

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Cheap Field Drug Tests Are Finally Getting Called Out By Courts As The Bullshit They Are

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Law enforcement loves cheap drug tests. First, they’re cheap, around $2/per. Second, they can turn a whole host of legal substances into probable cause for searches and arrests. Field drugs tests have converted everything from a deceased child’s ashes to bird poop (on a car hood, no less) into illicit substances justifying the removal of […]

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Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case Over AI's Right To A Patent; AI Inventions Remain Unpatentable

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Phew. We've written a bunch about Stephen Thaler's quixotic and dangerous quest to allow AI created works and inventions to receive copyrights and patents. It's repeatedly failed to convince people, especially US judges, that Congress intended anyone other than human beings as the creators and inventors to receive such monopolies. Thankfully, Thaler's loss streak continues. […]

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Whoa: UK's CMA Blocks Microsoft's Acquisition Of Activision Blizzard

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We’ve been following the entire saga of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for some time now. The whole thing has been decidedly messy, for various reasons. For starters, there are three main regulatory bodies that most of us have been waiting to hear from: the UK’s CMA, the USA’s FTC, and the EU. And […]

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How Refugee Applications Are Being Lost In (Machine) Translation

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As you may have noticed, headlines are full of the wonders of chatbots and generative AI these days. Although often presented as huge breakthroughs, in many ways they build on machine learning techniques that have been around for years. These older systems have been deployed in real-life situations for some time, which means they provide […]

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Just After Fox News Settled With Dominion, Lachlan Murdoch Dropped His Censorial SLAPP Suit Against Crikey

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Last fall, we wrote about Rupert Murdoch's son, Lachlan (who seems to have won out over brother James in the Succession-style fight to lead his father's nonsense peddling media outfit) lost his shit over an opinion piece in the Australian independent media organization Crikey and sued them for defamation in Australia. At the time, we […]

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Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased 'Magic' Cards In Error

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Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way […]

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Ninth Circuit Says A Horn Honk Isn't Protected Political Expression Even When That's The Honk's Entire Point

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Nearly five years ago, California resident Susan Porter sued local law enforcement for deciding her honk in support of anti-Rep. Darrell Issa protesters was worth citing her for. When she expressed her support for the protesters in a way people have always considered to be an appropriate display of support, she was pulled over by […]

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N.H. Bakery's Mural Causes Town Beuracrats To Go Nuts Over Donuts

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You might be a little surprised how many Techdirt posts have been done that involve donuts. I know, right? What a sentence! Still, we’ve got square donut trademarks, we’ve got donuts made to look like college sports teams, and we even have donut crumbs that some Joe Friday out there thought for sure was meth. […]

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DEA's Fentanyl Narrative Clown Car Being Overseen By A 'Reformer' Who Replaced Old Corruption With Her Own Brand Of Corruption

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The DEA has always been ridiculous when it comes to drugs. It overplays the downside, refuses to acknowledge any upside, and has been instrumental in ensuring people suffering from mental health issues are unable to access the drugs that might help them most. It’s a vindictive agency that acts like a Jack Chick religious tract […]

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Red Cross Continues To Want To Pretend That Video Game Wars Are IRL Wars

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I think I can state the following without controversy: video games are, by and large, a path for escaping the real world for the sake of entertainment. The idea is that the real world can be a place that we want to get away from, diving into some fantasy world where the same rules don’t […]

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Israeli Phone Malware Maker QuaDream Apparently Ready To Call It Quits After Suffering A Little Negative Press

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QuaDream, an NSO-alike with links to Israeli intelligence services, first made international headlines last year. And for the worst reasons. An investigation found QuaDream (much like NSO Group) sold iPhone-targeting malware to human rights violators. These sales were given a layer of plausible deniability, handled by a Cyprus-based company on behalf of QuaDream as it […]

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Nintendo Goes To War With YouTubers Right Before New 'Zelda' Release

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It’s no secret that Nintendo is extremely draconian when it comes to all things intellectual property concerning its assets. You can simply follow that backlink for a list of tons and tons of posts on Nintendo doing Nintendo things, which mostly amount to shutting down any use of its property, no matter how small, no […]

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Bethesda Does Denuvo Backwards: Puts The DRM On Game Released A Year Ago

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It’s been quite some time since we’ve talked about Denuvo and its once-vaunted anti-piracy DRM for video games. If I’m being totally honest, I had thought that part of the company’s business was simply gone, so poorly did the DRM perform. By the end, cracking groups were getting around Denuvo-protected games in days, sometimes a […]

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Bluesky Plans Decentralized Composable Moderation

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We just wrote about Substack's issue with content moderation and the Nazi bar problem. As I highlighted in that piece, any centralized service is going to be defined by their moderation choices. If you cater to terrible, abusive people, you become the site that caters to terrible abusive people. That's not a comment on free […]

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Twitter Suspends Reporter For Reporting On Twitter Hack, Using Same Policy Old Twitter Used To Block NY Post Hunter Biden Story

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The nonsense never ends. As you'll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn't fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop hard drive. […]

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Aaron Judge, MLB Beats Back Trademark Opposition From Squatter

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It’s nothing new that famous and recognizable sports figures have gotten into the business of filing all kinds of trademarks around their names, nicknames, and other terms and phrases associated with them. Anthony Davis trademarked “Fear The Brow” as a result of his identifiable unibrow, for instance. Remember Jeremy Lin? You might not if you’re […]

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Fox Agrees To Pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 Million Just After Jury Selection In Defamation Lawsuit

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With a ruling that basically said not only did Fox lie about Dominion, it did so despite being well aware of the truth, the Delaware court basically dared the alleged “news” agency to keep fighting Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. The evidence Dominion had already obtained was damning, as the court pointed out in its denial of […]

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EARN IT Act Is Back, And It's Still Terribly Destructive

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Some politicians never learn. Congress has been trying to shove through the EARN IT Act for the past two sessions, and thankfully it's failed both times. But, now it's back. Kinda. Far be it for the politicians looking to destroy the internet and encryption that keeps us safe to actually reveal the latest version of […]

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Killer Cop Derek Chauvin Still Costing Minneapolis, Minnesota Millions Of Dollars

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Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder. Officer Chauvin did this to himself. He may have been aided and abetted by […]

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Parler's New Owner Shuts Down Site: 'No Reasonable Person Believes Twitter For Conservatives Is A Viable Business Model'

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Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the alternative social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole we don't moderate schtick wasn't going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted […]

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Nintendo Wants Discord Subpoenaed To Reveal Leaker Of Unreleased 'Zelda' Artbook

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Readers of this site will know by now that Nintendo polices its intellectual property in an extremely draconian fashion. However, there are still differences in the instances in which the company does so. In many cases, Nintendo goes after people or groups in a fashion that stretches, if not breaks, any legitimate intellectual property concerns. […]

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Twitter Suspends User For Sharing Washington Post Story About Pentagon Docs Leaker

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You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as […]

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Try Fedi Friday: Just One Day A Week, Experiment With Alternative Social Media

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It's not at all surprising why tons of people, including journalists, are sticking around Twitter even if they shouldn't. Part of it is inertia. People were settled into what worked before, and change is difficult. Partly because of that, people are loathe to switch. Even those who have switched over to alternatives like Mastodon in […]

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You've Probably Never Heard Of It, But India's Other Big IT Project Might Be A World Beating One

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China and India are widely expected to be two of the most powerful global players in the decades to come. In some ways, they are alike. As Techdirt has reported, both have dismal records when it comes to Internet freedom, online censorship and privacy. But they differ in terms of their impact on the IT […]

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Microsoft Nixes Emulator That Snuck Through The Xbox Store For Series X/S

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If you’re not a part of a small but passionate group of emulation enthusiasts, you may not be aware that Microsoft has long waged a battle to keep emulators off of its Xbox consoles and the Xbox Store. Going back all the way to 2020, one particular app and developer has played something of a […]

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French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes

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A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases. Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student […]

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It's Good That AI Tech Bros Are Thinking About What Could Go Wrong In The Distant Future, But Why Don't They Talk About What's Already Gone Wrong Today?

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Just recently we had Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the Techdirt podcast to discuss their very own podcast mini-series Silicon Valley v. Science Fiction. Some of that discussion was about this spreading view in Silicon Valley, often oddly coming from AI's biggest boosters, that AI is an existential threat to the world, and […]

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Massachusetts State Police Fail (Twice) To Redact Troopers' Birthdates In Public Records Response

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To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to […]

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Someone's Trying To Copyright A Rhythm

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One of the most pernicious effects of today's copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against unauthorized - that is, unpaid - use by other artists. That goes against several thousand years of human creativity, which only exists thanks to successive generations […]

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Teslas Are A Privacy Nightmare: Staff Regularly Shared Camera Recordings, Made Memes & Jokes At Customers' Expense

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Ever since Tesla first made the news, I had thought it would be a great car to own. The last few years have really disabused me of that notion, given the serious questions raised about the integrity of the company's CEO. But even so, I'm pretty shocked by this latest Reuters report detailing how Tesla […]

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Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Tower Tree Stories

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Well, here we are at the last of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1927. So far we've featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon […]

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Everything Stadia Is Now Officially Dead, Project Head Exits Google

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It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Google’s Stadia product. What was originally billed as a forthcoming world class cloud video game streaming platform launched terribly, never gained much traction, and eventually was announced to be pivoting to serving as the backend platform for other companies that actually knew what the hell they were […]

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Indian Government Looking To Buy NSO-Esque Malware, But Not From NSO

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When NSO Group began making the wrong kind of headlines all over the world, suddenly lots of governments began at least feigning an interest in caring about what third-party tools their intelligence and security agencies were using to conduct surveillance. The problem wasn’t just NSO Group. True, the Israel-based firm was more than happy to […]

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Chipotle Sues Sweetgreen For Having Its Own 'Chipotle Burrito Bowl'

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If there is one aspect of trademark law that should be the most understandable for business leaders and their lawyers, if not for the general public, it’s that you generally cannot get trademarks on purely descriptive terms. Yes, you can name your product Coca-Cola and get a trademark on that term, but you cannot get […]

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American Companies Are Helping Power Russia's Massive Facial Recognition System

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Russia’s fighting a war in Ukraine and a war at home. As residents express their displeasure with their government, the government’s cameras and facial recognition AI are going into overdrive to ensure Putin and his pals control the narrative. Unfortunately, the Russian government is getting some help from the United States, albeit inadvertently. Russia has […]

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Italian Legislators Seek To Secure Their Existence And Future For Italian Children By Outlawing English Use By Citizens

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The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Betweens Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision […]

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EU Website Links Keep Getting Delisted Over Piracy Advertisements

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Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as […]

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The 404 Awards: Honoring The Worst Of The Worst Tech Policy Ideas

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Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it's ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.). But, error code 404 is (somewhat famously) the HTML code for page not found. In the early […]

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Appeals Court Reverses Murder Conviction Of Cop Who Killed Suicidal Man 11 Seconds After Entering His House

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Huntsville, Alabama police officer William Darby was the only officer on the scene who felt a suicidal man needed to be murdered. And he was the last to arrive, uninvited, to a scene apparently under control, handled by two other officers who were doing an admirable job de-escalating the situation. Darby made his decision to […]

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Adidas Opposes 'Black Lives Matter' Trademark Application, Then Quickly Runs Away

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Adidas is not exactly unknown in the seven circles of trademark insanity hell. The company most famously is a jealous defender of its vaunted “3 slanted stripes” branding. It takes that protective stance to ridiculous extremes, including going after an eSports league for having the “E” in question be three stripes, or suing to hell […]

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Canada Follows U.S. Lead On Mindless Consolidation With Rogers, Shaw Merger Approval

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In both Canada and the U.S., there’s no shortage of evidence that consolidation in telecom and media hasn’t been great for telecom and media — or employers, competition, or consumers. That’s not really stopping regulators in either country, who continue to approve massive harmful megadeals with only the pretense of meaningful review. Canada’s just approved […]

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Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Escape From 1927

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We’re nearing the end of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1927. So far we've featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, and Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager. Today, […]

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3CX Knew Its App Was Being Flagged By AV Platforms, Did Very Little During Supply Chain Attack

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If you don’t use the 3CX VoIP platform, or work in the MSP space with companies that do, you may have missed the news that the company suffered a massive supply chain attack over the past few days. With comparisons being made to the SolarWinds fiasco, this was really, really bad. Unsuspecting clients of 3CX […]

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Stupid Patent Of The Month: Traxcell Tech Gets Ordered To Pay Attorneys' Fees

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If someone loses a patent lawsuit very badlyto the point where they face orders to pay attorneys’ feesyou wouldn't think they would be eager to come back to court with a nearly identical lawsuit. But that's what has happened with this month's patent. What's more, the lawyer representing the patent owner, William Ramey, has been […]

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