Push To Strip Fox's Broadcast License Over Election Lies Gains New Momentum

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Last July, we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News' local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News' rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the character clause embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should hold a […]

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Paramount DMCAs 'Star Trek' Fan Project, Apparently Deaf To The History Of 'Star Trek'

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Of all the things we cover here at Techdirt, content producers going legal on pure fan-made productions that amount to fans expressing their fandom will always be the most befuddling for me. All the more so when it comes to content that was essentially kept alive by this same sort of fan-made work. Take the […]

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'The Day Before' To Become 'Dayworld' After Trademark Opposition From Calendar App Maker

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I swear, with some of the trademark stories we cover, it ends up feeling like we should have Yakety Sax playing on loop in the background for the readers. That’s certainly my sense when it comes to The Day Before‘s trademark struggles as of late. Where to start? Well, let’s start with the basics: is […]

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California Supreme Court Decides There's No Reason To Generate Precedent On Geofence Warrants

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The government’s preference for geofence (a.k.a. “reverse”) is well known. There have been enough cases and enough litigation in recent years to demonstrably show the government will go to data havens when searching for suspects rather than engage in in-person investigative work. Why canvass a neighborhood for potential suspects when you can ask Google to […]

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Office Depot Looking At Millions In Attorney's Fees After Winning Bullshit Copyright Suit

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I’m certainly not the first person to make this point, but the only thing that’s really going to prevent truly bullshit copyright infringement lawsuits from being filed in the first place is when bad actors get hit in the pocketbook. One of the most common ways that actually occurs is through courts ordering plaintiffs in […]

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Scammers Abusing ExTwitter's Fake 'Verification' Program To Prey On Angry Consumers

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One thing that the old Twitter was pretty good for was getting help on customer service problems. Rather than having to call customer service lines and wait on hold for hours on end only to be given the run around, many people found that complaining on Twitter was a lot faster and more helpful (likely, […]

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This Week In Techdirt History: August 20th - 26th

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Five Years Ago This week in 2018, after years of fighting, Prenda boss Paul Hansmeier followed the path of John Steele and pleaded guilty to mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ was trying to force Facebook to break encryption on voice calls, the EU was moving forward with legislation […]

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Nvidia Embraces Modding Community For 'Half Life 2' Project, Valve Apparently Cool With It

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It’s always nice when you get several stories in a row that contrast with one another in order to make a point. We were just discussing Rockstar’s decision to scoop up a roleplaying and modding community in order to build in new and interesting ways to play GTA and Red Dead Redemption games. What I […]

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Ting Disrupting Mediocre U.S. Broadband By Partnering With Annoyed Cities Like Colorado Springs

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Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing to a broken broadband market […]

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Trader Joe's United Union Seeks To Dismiss Grocer's Bullshit Attempt To Bully It Over Trademark

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Earlier this summer, we talked about Trader Joe’s joining the list of large companies combatting unionization efforts through the most petty of methods: complaining about those unions over “trademark infringement.” Trader Joe’s isn’t the first company to go down this route of course, as we’ve seen Walmart and Medieval Times have behaved similarly. Nor will […]

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Sixth Circuit Denies Immunity To Officers Who Waited 19 Months To Process A $30k Forfeiture

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This case involves both civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. First one, then the other. Not that the order matters as much as the government’s unwillingness to do much more than sit on the $30,000 in cash they took from an Ohio couple during a supposed drug investigation. Civil forfeiture allows the government to keep seized […]

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Ohio Court Tells Cops They Need To Know The Law If They're Going To Engage In Pretextual Stops

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Pretextual stops are law enforcement’s favorite way to fish for larger catches. Any minor moving violation can predicate a stop. That leads to conversations — often non-consensual — with drivers and passengers. Any number of factors can be opportunistically read by officers to add up to “reasonable suspicion.” Once that “develops,” the party begins. Cars, […]

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Huh: Microsoft To Sell Cloud Rights To Activision Games To Ubisoft To Placate The CMA

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Well, this certainly isn’t an outcome I would have predicted. While the saga of Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has certainly taken a long and winding road, as it stands today all the regulatory hurdles have seemingly been cleared save for the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). Unlike the FTC’s challenge to the […]

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Elon Musk Finally Realizes That Verification Requires More Than A Credit Card, Planning To Make Users Upload Gov't ID

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As you'll surely recall, Elon's first big brilliant idea upon taking over Twitter was to conflate two separate offerings that Twitter had: Twitter Blue, a premium upsell with extra features (some of which were useful) with Twitter's blue check verification program, which was created to help more well known users avoid impersonation. The original blue […]

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Amazon, Wreal LLC Settle Fire TV, FyreTV Trademark Case

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Writing as much as I do about trademark disputes and, more specifically, lawsuits, these are always the most frustrating ways for these disputes to end. I will spend some time examining a dispute, analyzing the merits on both sides, only to find that the suit is settled without any of the pertinent details of the […]

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Our Inability To Recognize That Remixing Art Is Transformative Is Now Leading To Today's AI/Copyright Mess

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If you've never watched it, Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series (which was recently updated from the original version that came out years ago) is an excellent look at how stupid our copyright laws are, and how they have really warped our view of creativity. As the series makes clear, creativity is all about […]

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Sigh: Rockstar Goes Right Back To Its War On Mods

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Well, that was quick. We had just been discussing the encouraging news that Rockstar had scooped up Cfx.re, a community dedicated to roleplaying within GTA and Red Dead Redemption games, as well as several mods made within that community. The only thing that made this newsworthy at all is that Rockstar has had an awful […]

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Social Engineering Meets Hacking With Prompt Hacking

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XKCD has multiple comics about how hacking isn't quite the way they make it out to be in movies: And: Both of these demonstrate how actual hacking is often a lot less sophisticated than people make it out to be. And, indeed, for years we've pointed out that social engineering is generally more effective than […]

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Netflix's Foray Into Video Game Streaming Is Getting Slightly More Interesting

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As a writer of opinion pieces, sometimes you go hard in the paint and the result isn’t precisely what you expected. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about Netflix’s announced decision to dip its toe into the video game market. At that point, word had gotten out about it all, though that word can […]

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Sexy Sandwiches: PornHub Goes After Kebab Shop Over Signs, Logos

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One of the common tests for whether something is trademark infringement is whether or not the public will be confused as to association between the infringer and another trademark owner. This typically comes down to several factors, such as the similarity within the uses and, importantly, whether the two entities compete in the same marketplace. […]

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OpenAI Says GPT-4 Is Great For Content Moderation, But Seems A Bit Too Trusting

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In our Moderator Mayhem mobile browser game that we released back in May, there are a couple of rounds where some AI is introduced to the process, as an attempt to help the moderators. Of course, in the game, the AI starts making the kinds of mistakes that AI makes. That said, there's obviously a […]

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Of Course Bank Execs Communicated Via Encrypted Messaging, But That's Not The Fault Of Encryption

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I don't think this is a surprise to anyone, but the SEC and the CFTC combined to issue fines on a bunch of Wall Street firms for execs communicating across encrypted messaging in a manner that wasn't recorded and preserved as required. Being in a regulated industry means having to deal with all sorts of […]

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Russian State Media Ponders Taking Over Trademark Name, Logo For Liberal Radio Station

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Let me do a bit of throat-clearing at the top of this post. As a reminder, the general purpose of trademark laws around the world is to serve as a source-identifier for the public in those markets. In other words, allowing someone to trademark a unique identifier as to a source of a good or […]

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Boston Dynamics wants to change the world with its state-of-the-art robots

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In this Inside the Mind of the CEO feature, s+b speaks with the leader of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that designs and builds robots for a range of commercial and public safety contexts. CEO Robert Playter talks about his company's transformation from an R&D company to a full-fledged product company, and he dispels worries about the potential harm robots could cause in the workplace and the wider world.

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One Fan Ports Abandoned PS1 Classic 'WipeOut', Dares Sony To Do Something About It

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More and more, as the video game industry matures, we find ourselves talking about game preservation and the disappearing culture of some older games as the original publishers abandon them. Often times leaving the public with no actual legit method for purchasing these old games, copyright law conspires with the situation to also prevent the […]

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Elon Musk, Once Again, Tries To Throttle Links To Sites He Dislikes

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Elon Musk's commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas has always been been a joke. Despite his repeated claims to being a free speech absolutist, and promising that his critics and rivals alike would be encouraged to remain on exTwitter, he has consistently shown that he has a ridiculously thin skin, and […]

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Emmett Till All Over Again: Six White Mississippi Cops Plead Guilty To Beating, Torturing Two Black Men

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The more things change, etc. We’ll never fully reject this country’s racist history if we insist on stocking our police departments with racists. The horrific events described here do not exist in a vacuum. The officers who felt comfortable doing these things felt comfortable for several reasons. First, there’s the long history of racist policing, […]

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Rockstar Scoops Up Modding, Roleplay Communities In A Departure From Previous Policy

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It’s important coming into this story to know and note that Rockstar, the publisher behind hit franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has waged a very public war on modding communities for its games for years now. Despite just how useful these modding communities tend to be in elongating the sales cycle […]

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Lawsuit: Deputy Tried To Shoot 'Charging' Pomeranian, Shot Woman On Porch Instead

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Cops love shooting dogs almost more than they like casually violating constitutional rights. Even the DOJ called cop-on-dog violence an “epidemic.” Cops dress like warriors, plaster their cars with Punisher logos, declare themselves the “thin blue line”… and then act like small woodland creatures the moment they encounter anything slightly unexpected. Guns, tasers, body armor, […]

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Microsoft Continues About Face On 'Right To Repair,' Makes Its Hardware Easier To Fix

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Microsoft has long been one of several companies that attempted to monopolize repair in a bid for profit, particularly when it has come to the company’s game consoles. But in recent years the company appears to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, it might be smart […]

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Massachusetts Poised To Make Calls Free For Prison Inmates And Families

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Massachusetts is now poised to make calls for prison inmates and their families free. The decision comes after decades where the government’s coddling of prison telecom monopolies resulted in inmate families being charged an arm and a leg simply to chat briefly with their incarcerated loved ones. According to Bolts, the reforms are part of […]

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Everyone Makes Mistakes, But When Cops Make Mistakes, The Guns Come Out

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There’s a massive gap between how the policed view “reasonable” policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to “serve and protect” seem to prefer the polar opposite. We get opacity, violence, and insular behavior any time we […]

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How to develop an intrapreneurial culture

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To instill an intrapreneurial culture in a business, it's not enough to hold one-off events like hackathons. It requires a systemic approach. David Lancefield identifies five foundational building blocks that will nurture the kind of value-creating opportunities that reap significant rewards.

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Pokmon Company Uses Fan Music In Trailer Without Crediting The Fan

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If you go take a look at all the different posts we’ve done on the topic of Pokmon, you will be left with one undeniable conclusion: the people behind Pokmon content take IP rights very seriously. This has particularly been true when it comes to some of the franchise’s most dedicated fans trying to express […]

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Beyond Netflix And Chill: Gaining Control Of Our Digital Lives Via Data Portability

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Sometimes, the best ideas for blog topics (or anything, really), come over a good meal with an amiable companion, and a few glasses of wine. As one does after a few glasses, my husband and I randomly ended up on the topic of data privacy specifically, an aspect of data privacy and rights that […]

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Correction: Our National Taco Tuesday Nightmare Is Over, Except In New Jersey

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It appears I slightly exaggerated the state of the Taco Tuesday trademark saga in my last post. After decades of ridiculous bullying coming from Taco John’s concerning the trademark it somehow was granted on “Taco Tuesday” — a term that is generic on its face, became more generic over time, and is also at least […]

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The Fear Of AI Just Killed A Very Useful Tool

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I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it's used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring […]

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ACLU Says NYC's Half-Baked WiFi Kiosks Still A Privacy Mess

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In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city's dated pay phones with information kiosks providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by context-aware ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC […]

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Witcher Producer: Show's Shit Viewership Is Because Of Dumb Americans And Social Media

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There’s nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren’t as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In […]

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Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites?

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Mozilla's Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create […]

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Texas Sued Over Age Verification Law And Porn Public Health Warnings

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The state of Texas was sued in a federal district court by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, and a slate of other companies including subsidiaries of Canadian firm MindGeek (owner of Pornhub). Other plaintiffs include the parent companies of popular adult sites like XVideos and Bang Bros, and […]

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By Making Its Porn Age Verification Law A 'Bounty' Law, Utah Able To Deflect Challenge To The Law's Validity

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Over the last few years, as we've seen state legislatures and governors focusing on culture war legislating, rather than sensible policy legislating, one thing that's become popular kicked off by Texas's anti-abortion law, but gladly embraced by Democrats as well is the idea of trying to avoid judicial scrutiny by taking enforcement out […]

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Preservation Fail: Hasbro Wants Old 'Transformers' Games Re-Released, Except Activision Might Have Lost Them

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And here we go again. we’ve been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period […]

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Jim Larkin, Backpage Exec, Dies By Suicide A Week Before His Trial

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Some unfortunate news. AZ Central reported yesterday that James Larkin, who was a free speech pioneer who built an alt-weekly newspaper empire, and then spun out the controversial classifieds ads site Backpage, died by suicide, one week before his latest trial. While there's been plenty of discussion about Backpage, related to questions around Section 230, […]

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Netflix Defeats Spurious 'Slumlord Millionaire' Lawsuit

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The gears of justice turn slowly, but they do turn. Late last year we discussed a delightful gentleman named Roland Macher, who goes by “Spanky”, because of course he does. Spanky was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman who found himself in prison for over 2 years because paying your taxes is hard or […]

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More Media Execs Back Effort To Pull Fox News' Philly Broadcast License Over Election Fraud Lies

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Last month we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News’ local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News’ rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the “character clause” embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should […]

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NFL Returns To Threatening Local New Orleans Businesses Over Fleur De Lis

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More than a decade ago, it came to our attention that the NFL was out in the streets of New Orleans threatening small businesses for the crime of using New Orleans related language alongside the use of images of the fleur de lis. Those actions were quite silly, given that the symbol and much of […]

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Unsurprisingly, Pornhub Blocks Arkansas IP Addresses

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It has been a busy day for Arkansas. Pornhub.com geo-blocked IP addresses in Arkansas in the latest protest against unworkable age verification laws. Arkansas is the fifth state to have an age-gating statute enter force and is the fourth to be geo-blocked by the parent company of Pornhub, the Montral-based firm MindGeek owned by Ethical Capital […]

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That New York Times Profile

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As some of you might have seen, this past weekend, the NY Times ran a very nice profile about me, written by Kashmir Hill. There's not much to say about it, other than it was an interesting (if somewhat awkward-feeling) experience to be the subject of a story, rather than the journalist covering it. But […]

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