Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, Apple bowed to some pressure from the right to repair movement, while Sony was continuing to battle with Vita tinkerers despite the device being discontinued. The EU copyright industry was continuing to demonize internet companies while we looked at how Section 230 enabled Pinterest’s content moderation efforts, and how COPPA and Section 230 appeared to be on a collision course. The saga of Devin Nunes’s lawsuits continued, as did the more recent saga of Bret Stephens being offended, and we had the author of the instigating “bedbug” tweet, David Karpf, on the Techdirt podcast.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, the City of London Police issued a vague and idiotic “warning” to doman registrars while the UK Culture Secretary was demanding search engines magically stop piracy. Tom Wheeler admitted there wasn’t really broadband competition in the US, while Iran’s Grand Ayatollah issued a fatwa against high-speed internet. Disney picked a trademark fight with Deadmau5, which turned out to be more of a mess than they probably hoped. Also, we wrote several posts responding to articles in the Huffington Post about a certain claimant to the title “inventor of email”.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2009, we were writing about the recent sudden conversion of UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson to an anti-piracy fanatic calling for kicking people off the internet, while others were seeing an opportunity to get him on board other draconian IP bandwagons as well. DigiProtect admitted to seeding files just to find people to demand settlement from, the BSA joined the call for three strikes laws, and Hollywood was once again asking the FCC for permission to break your DVR, while we wrote about why a music tax on internet connections was (still) a bad idea. Also, this was the week that the Lori Drew case was officially dropped.
