This Week In Techdirt History: October 5th – 11th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, Reps. Gabbard and Gosar brought out the ridiculous House companion to one of the Senate’s anti-Section 230 bills, while Donald Trump got on board the “repeal 230” bandwagon even though it was copyright that kept getting his content removed. A federal judge made a ridiculous free speech ruling regarding warning people about the presence of cops, while another judge refused to dismiss a bath of Nicholas Sandmann’s media lawsuits in a lazy ruling, and Devin Nunes was asking the appeals court to overturn NY Times v. Sullivan.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we looked at how net neutrality was failing to “destroy the internet” while the FCC quickly shot down the first very stupid net neutrality complaint. Former NSA directors were coming out strongly against backdooring encryption, while Senators kept lying about what the cybersecurity bill CISA would be used for. Meanwhile, we wrote about the TPP’s tobacco carve-out and how the agreement locked in broken anti-circumvention rules, and overall how it was less a free trade agreement and more a protectionist anti-free trade agreement. Then, Wikileaks offered up an early release of the final TPP intellectual property chapter.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the attention was on ACTA as the release of the draft text approached. The MPAA announced that it was in favor of the current agreement text even though nobody was supposed to have seen it yet (surprise!), EU parliament members were not at all happy about the deal, and our analysis of the text once it was released looked at how you can’t craft a reasonable agreement while leaving out stakeholders. Even after the release, negotiators were still claiming extraordinary need for for secrecy and turning off WiFi at a briefing. Meanwhile, we wrote about how historical audio recordings were disappearing due to copyright and got another example of the DMCA being used to stifle political speech.