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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...

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...

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:

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...

“AI,” or semi-cooked language learning models are very cool. There’s a world of possibility there in terms of creativity and productivity tools to scientific research. But early a…

It’s almost laughable that these two stories happened so close to one another. The Australian government has just announced a pilot program to test an online age verification system: And then, just…

Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new that it...

from the our-digital-reality dept

from the less-safety-equals-more-safety,-say-EuroCops dept

The European government has spent a few years trying to break encryption. The results have been, at best, mixed. Of course, the EU government claims it’s not actually interested in breaking encryption. Instead, it hides its intentions behind phrases like “client-side scanning” and “chat control.” But it all just means...

from the passcodes-ftw dept

Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would see a tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU’s AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoked as another reason why just such a system should be set up. The French collecting...

When the Apple Vision Pro launched back in February, the press had a sustained, two-month straight orgasm over the product’s potential to transform VR and the world of spatial computing. Down…

Last week, the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted to advance the Protecting and Enhancing Public Access to Codes Act, or the Pro Codes Act (H.R. 1631), to the full House. The bill would extend copyright protection to codes (such as building codes) that are developed by standards development organizations...

We’ve had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at Techdirt. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven’t exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading...

We’ve had several posts on the video game sensation that is Palworld in the past. Given that the game has been described by others as “Pokémon, but with guns”, we kicked things of…

What do Fentanyl and TikTok have in common? Well, the real answer is absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. But, if you want to push a nonsense moral panic, apparently, you compare the two. While it’s…

The 2021 infrastructure bill is throwing more than $42 billion at America’s mediocre broadband networks. And while a lot of that money will be put to good use shoring up fiber, a lot of it is…

Here we go again. There seems to be a thing happening among a select few big name video game publishers that have decided for some reason that they want to go to war with their own modding communit…