Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, the EU was pushing back against the US on the topic of strong encryption, while Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court said compelled password production violates the fifth amendment. We learned more about how freely Amazon gave cops access to Ring doorbell recordings, and about how much California was raking in by selling DMV data, while Senator Maria Cantwell released another federal privacy bill that wouldn’t go anywhere and wouldn’t deal with the actual issues. Copyright troll Richard Liebowitz was in trouble yet again, while copyright troll Mathew Higbee was demanding money for an image only his team viewed. And we also looked at how even the US military needed right to repair laws.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, a misinformed WSJ opinion piece was asking Apple and Google to add encryption back doors, while the NSA chief was warning of a pending cyberattack (but still also asking for back doors that would made it easier), while we wrote about how such back doors could harm intelligence gathering and military operations. The White House admitted that it still supported some parts of SOPA, while Rightscorp was hit with a class action lawsuit over robocall shakedowns. Also, we celebrated the completion of Techdirt’s switch to SSL, which was sponsored by Namecheap.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2009, we hadn’t yet adopted the term “copyright troll” but were already writing about what we called a “pay us or we’ll sue you for file sharing scheme”. Meanwhile, Senators were beginning to question the secrecy around ACTA, and we noted how its supporters were against a treaty providing more access to content for the vision impaired. We were alarmed that the FCC omitted a lack of competition from its list of barriers to universal broadband, and that Amazon convinced the USPTO to give it a patent about online gift giving. Also, the once-infamous “Spam King” Alan Ralsky was sentenced to four years in prison.
