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This week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. We’ve put a lot of work into designing a fun, fast-paced game and we need your help to produce it — so if you want to try your hand at running a social network, back our Kickstarter and secure your copy of the game.
Many of you...
It’s amazing just how many of the trademark disputes we see and discuss here at Techdirt ultimately result from the USPTO granting trademarks that never should have been granted in the first place. In the food industry specifically, we saw this recently in the whole “Taco Tuesday” episode, in which the Trademark Office granted Taco John’s a mark for “taco Tuesday,” despite the descriptive and...
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined...
I rarely log into Facebook these days, but I happened to do so last week and was a bit surprised to see this pop up saying that an advertising post we had put up for the VPN service CyberGhost nearly a decade ago had to be removed:
That’s a notice saying that Facebook had removed a Techdirt post from way back in 2016 (simpler times!) and a button saying “See why?” The link in question was to...
This is just what I needed to read after a post-election hell week or two. The city of Los Angeles has gone past exhaustion to vindictive irritation after being sued by the same cops it employs because it (legally) handed over photos and names of LAPD officers to journalist Ben Camacho. Ben Camacho then shared those with activist group, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which added those to its...
Be the first to play Starfield and Forza Motorsport on day one so you never miss a thing and enjoy hundreds of high-quality games like Minecraft Legends and more with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Game Pass Ultimate includes hundreds of high-quality console and PC games, plus online console multiplayer. New games are added all the time, so there’s always something new to play. Enjoy member deals and...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton loves to preach about “free speech” and “free markets”—except, apparently, when it comes to his political allies. In a stunningly hypocritical and authoritarian move, Paxton has launched an “investigation” to bully advertisers who have chosen not to support Elon Musk’s troubled ExTwitter platform.
This is a chilling attack on both free speech and free markets....
There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic...
This stop may not have been all that pretextual — after all, the officer clocked the driver doing 69 mph in a 55 mph speed limit — but it swiftly turned pretextual for reasons the officer couldn’t competently explain.
And that’s what cost the officer (and the prosecution) their evidence. Back in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that traffic stops end when the objective of the stop has been completed...
Here we go again. Many years ago, we wrote about how one sports psychologist, Dr. Keith Bell, filed a copyright lawsuit against a college over a retweet. Specifically, the retweet included an image of a single page from Bell’s book, Winning Isn’t Normal. These suits are nonsense, of course, as a retweet is not the same as publishing infringing material, not to mention all kinds of fair use...