That Which Copyright Destroys, 'Pirates' Can Save

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There's an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concerns so-called pirate subtitles for films. It's absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by generously helping others enjoy films and TV programs in languages they don't understand. In no sense do pirate […]

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Korean Royalty Collecting Society Fined For Acting Like Racketeering Thugs

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Copyright royalty collection societies don’t exactly have a stellar reputation for operating on the ethical up and up. Our pages are filled with these collection societies pulling all sorts of bullshit. Some of my favorites are things like when one society insisted on collecting royalties from a bar that was shut down due to COVID, […]

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To Foster Competition In Social Media, Invest In Open Source Trust And Safety Tools

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Over the last decade, a small handful of large platforms have become de facto arbiters of how people communicate and share information with one another. As concerns about that concentrated power and those platforms' decisions have piled up, so too have calls for greater competition and choice in social media and other services for communication […]

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Copyright Self Censorship Denies Us Another Updated Version Of An Abandoned Game

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And here we go again. We have been talking about both the concept of video game preservation being lost to the copyright gods, as well as how copyright often prevents fan-made creations and content around game franchises, for years and years now. Both topics are quite frustrating and both serve as examples of how copyright […]

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Legacy Copyright Industries Obsession With Infringement Is Pathological

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As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) details, for decades the copyright industry has lobbied consistently (and successfully) for more and harsher laws targeting alleged infringement. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that these laws are used on a massive scale every day. But some companies take this to extremes. Here, for example, […]

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Federal Judge Says State Troopers' 'Kansas Two Step' Bullshit Violates The Rights Of Drivers

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For years, Kansas Highway Patrol troopers have stopped motorists on interstate highways. That’s the job. But the job became much more interesting when neighboring states legalized marijuana. Colorado led the way, with others following, but Colorado’s actions have had the most impact on the KHP. Missouri’s more recent legalization has only compounded the problem facing […]

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Sun Life is building a culture of growth and transformation

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In this Inside the Mind of the CEO interview, s+b speaks with the leader of Sun Life, a financial-services giant in life insurance and asset management. CEO Kevin Strain discusses his strategy for growth and expansion and provides his views on the key role culture will play in helping Sun Life become a more agile and digital company.

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Our Long, National Taco Tuesday Nightmare Is Finally Over

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Let me start this post with an anecdote. I’m in my 40s and have been a Chicago Cubs fan my entire life. If you know anything about baseball, then you know that means that for more than 30 years, my entire fandom was wrapped in an identify of losing, and I was also saddled with […]

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Court Says It's Fine For Cops To Use Cell Phones To Peep Into People's Cars

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What is “plain view?” Cops claim it’s anything anyone could see if they happened to be in the same place at the same time, including those moments when citizens deploy their own air force. Force your way into the house under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment? Anything out in the open is […]

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How to build a sustainable city at scale

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Berlin TXL, named for the old Berlin Tegel Airport on which it sits, is a sustainable city within a city, which by 2045 will be home to 10,000 people--a planned community where shops, schools, and doctors will all be a five-minute walk away. It's a triple-zero strategy: erect buildings that consume zero energy, emit zero carbon, and leave behind zero waste.

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FTC Puts Challenge To Microsoft, Activision Deal On Hold

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Well, well, this may be a story that is starting to come to a close. With the EU having already approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the two remaining hurdles Microsoft had to jump through were with the UK’s CMA agency and the FTC here in the States. After a recent loss in court blocking […]

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Connecticut State Troopers Apparently Tried To Bury Biased Stop Data By Falsifying 26,000 Traffic Tickets

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Biased policing is just the way things are done. Decades of targeting minorities for being minorities has resulted in tons of garbage data now being used to justify “smarter” policing guided by AI that has been fed nothing but garbage. Every so often, law enforcement agencies are forced to reckon with their racist brand of […]

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Telecom Stocks Plummet After Report Shows Many Cables Lined With Lead

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While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, their cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a […]

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Bill Limiting Data Broker Sales To Law Enforcement Moves Forward

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The Supreme Court made it clear in 2018 with its Carpenter decision: gathering historical cell site location info in bulk was impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. If law enforcement wanted to engage in third-party-enabled long term tracking of suspects via this info, it needed to get a warrant first. That ruling seemed to make everything […]

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New Project Uses AI To Turn Project Gutenberg Texts Into Free Audiobooks With Lifelike Voices In 30 Seconds

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Reading through the increasing number of Techdirt articles about AI, the overwhelming impression is that many people think AI is bad, and needs to be reined in before it destroys journalism/creativity/society/humanity (delete as applicable). To see an interesting new phase of an old technology attacked in this way is rather depressing, since it seems to […]

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Maryland's Top Court Calls Bullshit On Ballistic Forensics

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So much of what is considered [cough] bulletproof evidence in criminal cases is nothing more than pseudoscience dressed in a lab coat. For years, prosecutors have presented science-y sounding “evidence” derived from lab techniques that had never undergone any sort of peer review or blind testing. The government — especially the DOJ — has also […]

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YouTuber Tries To Register Abandoned MythBusters Trademark; Discovery Is Not Happy With This

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Last fall, a few people sent me this fun video from YouTuber Allen Pan, which briefly talks about how he ended up with a MythBusters trademark for clothing and apparel. I didn't write it up at the time because, while amusing, the discussion of the trademark (and, for that matter, copyright) issues was so confused […]

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Dish Lays Off Employees As Cord Cutting Chips Away At Dying Satellite TV Company's 5G Pivot

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As we just noted, satellite TV provider Dish Network’s planned pivot into streaming video and wireless isn’t going great. The company continues to bleed traditional satellite TV subscribers, new streaming subscribers, and wireless customers. And the company’s supposed 5G network (spawned during the Trump FCC era) has, by most accounts, proven to be a bit […]

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The Stevens Papers Part II: A Peek Behind The Scenes At The Making Of Quality King, Tasini, And Dastar

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A previous post discussed what the recently released files of the late Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens revealed about development of the Court's decisions in Lotus v. Borland, MGM v. Grokster, and Eldred v. Ashcroft. This post looks at the disclosures contained in the files for Quality King v. L'anza, New York Times v. Tasini, and Dastar v. Twentieth […]

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Ninth Circuit Says City's Rejection Of Man's 'FCKBLM' License Plate Is Totally Constitutional

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The law surrounding vanity license plates is unsettled, to vastly understate the reality. There’s no consensus across states, much less federal jurisdictions. Every government seems to have its own idea about what’s offensive and what isn’t, as well as its own take on whether a personalized plate is government speech or merely the expression of […]

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Trader Joe's Joins List Of Companies Combatting Unions Via Trademark Bullying

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Grocery chain Trader Joe’s is not a complete stranger to Techdirt’s pages, and not for good reasons. The company, in the past, has shown itself to be perfectly willing to abuse trademark law to stop anything it doesn’t like, such as a man reselling its goods across borders where the company has no stores (perfectly […]

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If The Crime Rate Goes Down After Half A Cop Shop Quits, What Are We Even Paying For?

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Law enforcement agencies often command an outsized portion of city and county budgets. The argument for this expenditure is basically just Blue Line bullshit: without the police at full staff, surely every locality will descend into criminal anarchy. That’s the argument but the facts don’t bear it out. There’s very little evidence that increased law […]

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5th Circuit Puts A Hold On Louisiana Court's Injunction Barring Gov't From Talking To Companies, After District Court Refuses To

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So we wrote about Judge Terry Doughty's somewhat questionable ruling preventing the Biden White House from communicating with tech companies or researchers regarding certain areas of disinformation. As we noted, there were some good elements in the ruling, reminding government officials of the 1st Amendment restrictions on coercion in attempting to silence protected speech. But […]

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Louis Vuitton Opposes Trademark Application For Small Family Business Selling Gardening Tools

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If you go back and read nearly all of the posts we’ve done on luxury fashion company Louis Vuitton, you’ll see a history of a company that is about as big a pain in the ass when it comes to intellectual property bullying as you’ll find. The company often times takes it’s “protecting” of it’s […]

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Study: The Overwhelming Majority Of Historical Video Games Are Endangered

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Video games are a form of art and a form of expression. While that used to be somewhat controversial to state decades ago, nobody of any value really argues that point any longer. And the moment you accept that simple fact, it throws into light how absolutely absurd it is that the preservation efforts of […]

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An Indiana Police Department Has Been Using Clearview AI For A Year, Much To The Surprise Of Its Oversight

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Out of all the purveyors of facial recognition tech, Clearview is by far the sketchiest. It has compiled billions of photos and other personal info by doing little more than scraping the internet of anything that isn’t locked down. Web scraping isn’t inherently evil, but Clearview certainly makes scraping appear malicious. There are any number […]

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Chicago PD Sued Over Mass Traffic Stops Of Minorities That Do Almost Nothing To Stop Crime

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The Chicago Police Department is extremely problematic, even by the extremely lax standards of US law enforcement. It has been home to a domestic black-site operation. It has been hit with reform mandates from federal courts. It has shown no interest in rooting out the worst of its officers. And it has engaged in a […]

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FCC 'Investigation' Into Broadband Caps Probably Won't Amount To Much

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We’ve noted for decades how US broadband caps are little more than a predatory cash grab. The usage limits and overage fees have zero real technical function and don’t manage congestion. Instead they’re little more than a glorified price hike; a way for regional telecom monopolies to nickel-and-dime captive customers, charging them more money for […]

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White House Warns Hollywood Producer, Chewing Gum Magnate That Buying NSO Group Is Probably A Bad Idea

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Let’s get this out of the way right up front: NSO Group — as ethically horrendous as it is — offers at least one unbeatable product. Its Pegasus malware is a zero-click exploit capable of fully compromising targets’ phones. This means the company is worth something, even if it’s not the sort of company most […]

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Japanese Media Spots The Trick After Latest In-N-Out Trademark Tourism Popup

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Finally! We’ve been covering famed burger chain In-N-Out’s longstanding bullshit tactic for retaining trademark rights all over the world by standing up popup locations briefly once every couple of years just to satisfy the requirements to use the mark in commerce. What is far too common in the coverage about lawsuits or threats of suits […]

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Large EU Internet Retailer Whines That It Shouldn't Have To Comply With The DSA's Most Stringent Rules

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A few months ago, when the EU designated 17 companies as VLOPs Very Large Online Providers subject to the most stringent regulations, one name that I heard lots of folks in the US be confused about was Zalando, which is a large EU-focused online retailer. It was also one of only two companies […]

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Germany's New Copyright Exception For Pastiche Applied For First Time

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Although overall the EU Copyright Directive is bad news for the digital world because of things like its need for the use of automated upload filters, it does contain a few glimmers of good sense. For example, it rectifies a failing of the previous EU legislation in this area, the 2001 Infosec Directive. The 2001 law allowed Member States […]

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NetChoice Challenges Yet Another Ridiculously Bad State Internet Law

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NetChoice has been quite busy the last few years suing to stop a wide variety of terrible state laws designed to mess up parts of the internet. It took on Florida's social media content moderation law and won (twice). It took on Texas' social media content moderation law and won at the district court, and […]

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Part 2: Microsoft Bolsters Sony's Justification For Withholding Console Info In Court Doc

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The ongoing saga that is Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision Blizzard continues! As a brief review of the scoreboard will show: the EU has approved the purchase, the UK’s CMA has blocked it and Microsoft has appealed that decision, and the lawsuit brought by the FTC in the States is currently in the pretrial phase. […]

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Portugal's Shameful Approach To Implementing The EU Copyright Directive

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The depressing tale of how the European Union passed copyright's worst new law, the EU Copyright Directive, occupies some 36 pages in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free). The main legislation was finalized over four years ago, but countries are still grappling with the problem of implementing its sometimes contradictory requirements in national laws. […]

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Something Stupid This Way Comes: Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads, Because Meta Hired Some Of The People Elon Fired

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Just fucking fight it out already. The whole stupid cage match brawl thing was started when Meta execs made some (accurate) cracks about Elon's management of Twitter, and Elon couldn't handle it. But, now with the launch of Meta's Threads, Elon feels the need to send a ridiculously laughable legal threat to Meta. Elon's legal […]

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Top EU Court Advisor Says Technical Standards, Like Laws, Should Not Be Locked Down By Copyright

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One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against […]

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Court Tosses Evidence After PD's Own Pole Camera Undercuts Officer's Claims About Seeing A Gun

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Does this look like someone carrying a gun? That’s from a recent federal court decision [PDF], granting defendant Luis Cerda’s motion to suppress. NYPD sergeant Christopher Colon saw something else. He saw a gun. He needed to see a gun. He was so desperate to bust someone else entirely (Alberto Santiago, a.k.a. “Dot Com”) that […]

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Bluesky Continues To Explore More Creative Moderation Plans Openly

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I continue to be fascinated in watching how the various decentralized protocol-based social media systems are evolving in particular how they're dealing with the challenges of content moderation. There was an interesting discussion a recently on nostr over whether or not moderation should be best handled by relays or clients*. ActivityPub has, of course, […]

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External Audit Finds Sacramento PD Hasn't Updated Its Search And Seizure Policy Since 2007

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The ignorance of cops is almost always their saving grace. If they can’t “reasonably” know the intricacies of the laws they uphold or the rights they’re supposed to respect, they’re too stupid to be punished for their wrongdoing. That’s how qualified immunity works. And that’s why it behooves police departments to keep officers in the […]

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