ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore. That’s not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it’s a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution...
Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about “indoctrination” in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to children....
Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok. We’ve seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of “kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable.”...
I’ll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it’s so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this means a great deal of consternation over...
While lawmakers, looking to get on cable TV, spent much of the last few years performatively hyperventilating about TikTok privacy and national security issues, few of those same folks seem quite as bothered by the parade of obvious, nasty vulnerabilities in the nation’s telecom networks.
Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That’s some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn’t mean that we need to accept it....
Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That’s some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn’t mean that we need to accept it....
It’s a funny thing what game publishers sometimes try to do when it comes to releasing games early to internet streamers as a way to boost interest in their games. I’ve heard stories of all kinds of crazy stipulations that streamers have to sign off on contractually in order to get access to the game. They can only show...
Bit of a weird one here. So, there’s the assumption made by all cops and most courts that any area visible to passersby does not have an expectation of privacy. That means front yards, open garages, etc. Courts and cops have mostly agreed this expectation of privacy does not suddenly appear no matter how long the government...
If you’re a fan of chaos, well, the TikTok ban situation is providing plenty of chaos to follow. Ever since the US government made it clear it was seriously going to move forward with the obviously unconstitutional and counterproductive plan to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or have the app effectively banned from the...
The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being discussed, the Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda wrote an insightful and practical report on what needed changing. Most of his recommendations were ignored in the final EU...
Before T-Mobile acquired Sprint, activists, consumer groups, and deal critics (including me) warned repeatedly that the telecom sector megadeal would result in layoffs, less competition, higher prices, and a lower quality product overall. The Trump FCC and DOJ very clearly didn’t care; they rubber stamped the deal without even...
Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA — (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an “open access” fiber network that allows any...
Is there any law that Elon Musk actually understands? The latest is that he’s lost yet another lawsuit, this time (in part) for not understanding copyright law. There have been a variety of lawsuit…...
You may recall last month’s hilarious story of lawyer Mike Dunforth’s response to a vexatious angry demand letter from IMG, representing the LAPD Foundation, claiming that a t-shirt with the following “Fuck the LAPD” logo violated its IP rights:
Section 230, the legal backbone of the internet, is under attack again. This time, it is from a bipartisan pair of legislators who seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the law works and what the consequences of repealing it would be.
There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was also a flurry of talk claiming...
As California (and possibly Congress) are, again, revisiting instituting link taxes in the US, it’s worth highlighting that our prediction about the Canadian link tax has now been shown to be correct. It didn’t harm Meta one bit to remove news.
Every once in a while you get a trademark bullying story that meets a just and proper end. Almost a year ago, we discussed how Louis Vuitton, famous maker of luxury fashion products and infamous trademark bully, did its bullying thing when it opposed the trademark application for a company in the UK called L V Bespoke. Louis...