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Technology Moral Panics: But Think Of The Children!
Recently I wrote about a dreadful article in USA Today hyping up the "oh-no-think-of-the-children problem" of predators using console games to seek out kids. This followed similarly bogus news articles hyping up the threats of predators on social networks. Yet, all the "panic" raised by those arti ...
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Newspapers Who Relied On Bebo Party Report Sued For Defamation
Back in May there were a series of stories that made the rounds concerning a British girl who had her 16th birthday party at her parents pricey estate in Spain. The stories, based on the girl's own account on the social network Bebo claimed that she had posted an invite to various social networks, ...
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Lyle Lovett: Albums Sold? 4.6 Million. Money Made From Album Sales? $0
Every time we talk about music industry business models, we get some folks who have to chime in with some claim about how musicians should be able to sell their music just like they have for years. Of course, the truth is that it's quite rare for any musician to make money from selling their albums ...
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Now Companies Suing eBay For Giving Others Better Listings
Remember all those lawsuits against Google by people who didn't like how Google listed them (i.e., they felt that Google had them too far down the rankings)? Well, it appears that some similar lawsuits are being filed against eBay. One jewelry sales company, Windsor Auctions, felt that it should h ...
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Time To Close The ITC Patent Injunction Loophole
For quite some time, we've been pointing out how patent holders have been using a bit of a loophole to get two separate shots at getting an injunction against other companies in patent disputes. This became even more popular after the Supreme Court ruled in the MercExchange case that injunctions ba ...
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Andrew Cuomo Gloats Over Getting AOL To Do What It Already Does
We've already pointed out how ridiculous it is for NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to be pressuring ISPs to start blocking news groups and access to certain websites with "objectionable" content. Doing so actually makes the problems Cuomo is trying to fix worse. That's because he's not actually g ...
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Konami Claims Rock Band Violates Its Patents
Just a few months ago guitar maker Gibson sued just about everyone for patent infringement over a patent it held on "virtual concerts." It looks like that lawsuit may have woken up others who happen to hold "virtual concert" patents. Video game maker Konami, which had some virtual concert games ye ...
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Man Sues Newspaper For Laying Off Reporters
It's no secret that plenty of newspapers have been cutting staff and even the size of their papers in recent months. It's really a reaction to the fact that newspapers spent way too many years in denial that they were no longer the only news sources in town. So now they finally have to adjust, and ...
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DRM Company Releases One-Sided Study On DVD Copying
The MPAA has probably been the worst of the various Big Copyright industries in terms of the level to which their studies exaggerate the negative impact of unauthorized copying, while totally ignoring any positive impact. For example, it likes to widely cite a study (which it paid for) that triple- ...
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Judge's Order For Google To Hand Over YouTube Usage Morphs Into Google Backlash On Storing IPs
There was plenty of attention given to the judge's order that Google hand over log files to Viacom's lawyers in the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit, with much of it focused on what an awful ruling this was. Now it appears that some are trying to use this bad ruling to actually focus negative attention on Go ...
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Comcast Believes In FCC Authority When It Suits Comcast; Otherwise? Not So Much
Does Comcast believe the FCC has authority over its traffic shaping efforts? Well, it may just depend on who's asking. When the FCC asserted that it did have a say in regulating Comcast's traffic shaping efforts, Comcast emphatically stated that the FCC's authority does not extend that far. And, ...
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When Everything On The Internet Is Encrypted...
For years, we've been pointing out that as the entertainment industry, telcos and the government increase efforts to spy on the activities of users (for various reasons, good or bad), all it's going to do is speed the adoption of encryption technologies. Well, that appears to be happening. Thanks ...
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ACLU Sues Over New Surveillance Act
Following Congress granting President Bush the "get out of jail free" card he demanded, it probably comes as no surprise that he's signed the bill into law -- claiming (laughably) that the bill was designed to "protect the liberties of our citizens." It's unclear what in the new bill does that -- t ...
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Is Cost Accounting To Blame For Patent Hoarding?
Michael F. Martin is a lawyer/investor who is always good for some interesting debates in the comments here on the question of patents. He's a supporter of the patent system, with some fixes. Suffice it to say that he and I disagree on an awful lot, though I appreciate his willingness to try to re ...
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Is This The Best Homeland Security Can Do In Defending Laptop Searches At The Border?
The courts have said that US Customs officials do not need probable cause to search laptops. While some Senators are questioning why Department of Homeland Security is searching laptops without probable cause, the administration is working hard to defend such searches at the border as reasonable. ...
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PR Guy Says Bloggers Should Shut Up And Take Press Releases
When we first started Techdirt, one of the things I said clearly on the site was not to send us press releases, as we had no interest in writing about them. Yet, so many PR people clearly chose not to read the site and they send them anyway. They don't read the fact that we don't want press releas ...
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Connecticut Still Wants To Try Julie Amero
You may recall the case of Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Connecticut who was found guilty of charges that she had showed pornography to children in her classroom, and who faced 40 years in jail. The problem was that the police and the prosecutors seemed unable to understand what had actually ...
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Japanese Gov't Says No (Again) To An iPod Tax
Back in 2005, the recording industry in Japan urged the government to create an iPod tax, adding a tax to every iPod (or other digital music player) sold. The idea was that the recording industry wanted to assume that every iPod owner was obviously "stealing" music, and this tax would help pay for ...
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Nobel Prize Winners Continue To Explain How IP Hurts Innovation
We've discussed multiple times in the past about how economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz believes that patents hurt innovation. Michael Geist points us to his latest speech, where he teamed up with John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, to point out how the patent system i ...
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Dutch Chipmaker Sues To Prevent Researchers From Publishing Info About Security Flaws
NXP Semiconductors, which was formerly Philips Semiconductor division, is suing some researchers to prevent the publication of a paper outlining the security flaws in smartcards made by NXP. These smartcards are widely used for transit systems and building locks. Of course, the fact that these car ...
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