Techdirt

A major insurance company recently announced that it would offer discounts on life insurance to customers who wear activity trackers and log data showing they live a healthy lifestyle. This understandably freaked out some people, but there are interesting aspects to the idea as well. There's plenty to consider, so this week regular hosts Mike, Hersh and Dennis discuss whether this is an exciting innovation, a worrying expansion of surveillance culture, or both.

We've done it — we've solved the challenge of content moderation! (Checks notes). No, wait, sorry: we haven't. But what we have done is invited Kate Klonick, law professor and author of the excellent paper The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech, to join us for an in-depth discussion about how we got here and why there are no easy or simple answers for content moderation.

Anonymity is back in the news in a big way, especially since the New York Times published an explosive opinion piece by an anonymous White House official. Here at Techdirt — proudly one of the few blogs that still allows completely anonymous comments with no sign-up — we've talked about anonymity for a long time in the context of the internet. On this week's episode, Mike and regular co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy talk about the benefits, challenges, and overall importance of anonymous speech.

Copyright is a big, complicated monster of a law, composed of patchwork updates and shaped by international agreements — which is, in fact, the source of a lot of its problems. But fixing copyright means understanding it, so this week we've got a conversation with UCLA professor Neil Netanel, author of the new book Copyright: What Everyone Needs To Know, because there's always something new to learn about copyright.

Is the way companies are currently structured and operated conducive to long-term innovation? It's a tough question, but there are plenty of reasons to consider that short-term profit incentives might be getting in the way of better overall innovation strategies — and lots of possibilities for how we might rethink companies to change this. This week, the regular crew of Mike, Hersh and Dennis discuss how this problem could be addressed, and whether there's truly a problem at all.

Have you ever thought about the legal issues surrounding emoji? Don't worry, most people haven't. But they are myriad and interesting, with roots nearly two decades ago following the emergence of emoticons — and two people who definitely have thought a lot about it are Eric Goldman and Gabriella Ziccarelli, who join us on this week's episode to talk about the various intersections of emoji and the law.

There has long been anxiety around the "permanent record" of the internet, and recent public shamings based on old tweets have brought that fear to the forefront for many people. But the mass deletion of old tweets also means throwing out huge amounts of potentially valuable information. Is there a technological solution? A cultural one? This week, we're joined by returning guests Cathy Gellis and Parker Higgins to discuss a proposal for fixing the problem without sacrificing the permanent record.

The tides of public opinion on economics seem to be shifting, and criticism of the very idea of free markets is on the ride. The conversation is messy, confusing, and transcends many traditional political boundaries — so we've got an expert source to help us dig in. EconTalk host Russ Roberts joins us to look at why so many people don't trust capitalism anymore.

We've got a crossover episode this week, all about the EU's disastrous moves on the copyright front. Mike recently joined the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss the subject with Paul Matzko and Will Duffield, and now you can listen to it here on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

One thing we've talked about for a long time at Techdirt is the importance communities for media outlets, including our own. These days, it feels like a lot of media companies are giving up on this work altogether and outsourcing it to social media platforms — but that means foregoing some of the most powerful aspects of the internet. This week, we're joined by Josh Millard, who recently took over MetaFilter, to talk about building online communities and not relying on Facebook.