The groups behind a push to get the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate YouTube’s alleged violation of children’s privacy law, COPPA, have today submitted a new letter to the FTC that lays out the appropriate sanctions the groups want the FTC to now take. The letter comes shortly after news broke that the FTC ...

I'm a volunteer on the board of The Metabrainz Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains the Metabrainz service that produces accurate metadata on music that helps listeners locate the music they love and musicians and services accurately allocate revenues from online services. Metabrainz's material is strictly Creative Commons, including the art its users include in their ...

A legal challenge to a data transfer mechanism that’s used by thousands of companies to authorize taking European citizens’ personal data to the US for processing has been delayed. As we reported last month, the General Court of the EU had set a date of July 1 and 2 to hear the complaint brought by ...

For years, Paul Hansmeier terrorized internet users through his copyright trolling racket Prenda Law, evading the law through shell companies and fraud, until, finally, he was brought to justice and pleaded guilty last August.

Now, Hansmeier has been sentenced to 14 years in prison and must pay $1.5m in restitution to his victims ...

Many states require criminals to make financial restitution to the victims of their crimes -- paying to replace the things the damaged or stole -- and this applies to juvenile offenders as well as adults.

The result is that juvenile offenders who have served their time and are trying to rebuild their lives, re-establish their educations, ...

Stalkerware -- spyware sold to people as a means of keeping tabs on their romantic partners, kids, employees, etc -- is a dumpster fire of terrible security (compounded by absentee management), ****** business practices, and gross marketing targeted at abusive men who want to spy on women.

To make matters worse, ...

Rebecca Giblin (previously) writes, "We've just dropped a new study we've been working on for a year. You know how it keeps being claimed that we need longer copyrights because nobody will invest in making works available if they're in the public domain? Heald and some others have done some great work debunking ...

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT) is a nonprofit that kicked off its mysterious existence by filing a string of lawsuits against restaurant chains and coffee roasters for not posting California Proposition 65 notices (the notices are mandatory warnings about the presence of "chemicals known to the state of California to cause ...

In a crackdown named "Operation Meltdown", New York City authorities have seized 46 ice cream trucks with unpaid fines.

To get away with not paying fines, the release said, the operators created dozens of "shell" companies and systematically re-registered trucks at the Department of Motor Vehicles under the names of different corporations. By the time ...

Chinese regulators might follow the European Union’s lead to make life harder for internet companies such as TikTok that closely track behavior of their users in a move that could significantly hurt their revenue. Last week, Beijing proposed a new set of measures to enforce data security for individuals and the nation overall. According to ...