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.
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...
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…...
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.
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...
oberto Escobar appears to want to keep banging his head against this particular brick wall for some reason. Roberto, brother to infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has been trying to assert trademark and other rights to his brother’s name for years now. It started in Columbia, in which the country flat out refused to grant...
Donald Trump, who has demanded both that we “open up our libel laws” and that we “repeal Section 230,” was just protected from a defamation claim thanks to Section 230. How about that?
Over the last few years, there have been a ton of lawsuits, pretty much all of them dubious, arguing that social media is inherently harmful to children (something the research does not show) and that therefore there is some sort of magic product liability claim that will hold social media companies responsible. A bunch of those...
Well, this ought to prompt another round of police-protecting legislation in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed two bills into law — one that creates a 25-foot “no go” zone around police officers and one that strips police oversight boards of their independence. And that’s on top of the immediate effort made...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is an utter asshat. Not only is he the chosen defender of litigation over unconstitutional laws passed by an equally idiotic legislature, but he’s also the man behind plenty of Texas government action meant to make things worse for plenty of Texas residents.
In a world where copyright law has run amok, even creating a silly parody song now requires a massive legal disclaimer to avoid getting sued. That’s the absurd reality we live in, as highlighted by the brilliant musical parody project “There I Ruined It.”...
Last month Oregon state lawmakers passed a new “right to repair” law making it easier and cheaper to repair your electronics. The law requires that manufacturers that do business in the…
Elon Musk’s favorite lawyer, Alex Spiro, isn’t having a great week. Sure, sure, he just signed up embattled NYC mayor Eric Adams as a new client, but he seems to have royally fucked up in defending…
I guess being incarcerated isn’t dehumanizing enough. Being treated like barely sentient meat deserving of any abuse perpetrated by guards or other inmates just isn’t enough oppression,…
In all of the posts we have done on the topic of video game preservation, I have often made the point that it’s probably long past time that there be some sort of political action to address …
I really cannot believe it’s 2024 and there are still video game publishers out there that want to go to war on their own modding communities. I expect this sort of thing from the Nintendos o…
Lobbyists for Charter Communications (Spectrum) have snuck some sneaky language into New York State’s latest budget bill in an effort to undermine popular community-owned broadband networks.P…
Almost exactly two years ago, we discussed a strange story in which video game publisher Bungie sued a bunch of John Does specifically for inputting fraudulent DMCA takedown claims on YouTube video…
The EU’s much-touted Digital Services Act, hailed as the gold standard for whipping those unruly internet platforms into shape, has hit an embarrassing snag. Apparently, the EU forgot to cc a…
These days, everyone hates big tech, and that’s often for very good reasons. You shouldn’t trust giant centralized companies that have collected a ridiculous amount of data on you. There are few re…