This Week In Techdirt History: May 29th – June 4th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, things seemed pretty bad on the privacy front. Intelligence community leaks were normalizing domestic surveillance abuses, the Fifth Circuit said no warrants were required to obtain near-realtime cell site location info, and while DHS agencies were stepping up demands for social media account info from visa applicants Congress was fast-tracking a bill to give them access to NSA collections. At least one judge did, thankfully, order the government to stop messing around and hand over documents in a surveillance case.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, some members of the SOPA brigade were admitting the risk it posed to the internet, and newly-revealed negotiating documents were shedding light on how US companies had excessive input on ACTA (which was edging closer to death in the EU). Google's new transparency reports were continuing to expose just how stupid a lot of DMCA notices are, while the Chamber of Commerce was continuing its tradition of vastly inflating the number of jobs supposedly created by intellectual property law. Olympic madness reached new lows when a church sale was shut down over a handmade doll with a logo on its sweater. And the judge in the Oracle/Google case delivered a thorough smackdown of Oracle's copyright claims.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, political pressure was causing MySpace to develop an itchy trigger finger for account bans, the list of countries banning YouTube was growing, MLB was still claiming that Sling breaks the law, South Korea was working on a free trade" agreement that would restrict all kinds of P2P and user-generated content sites, and we examined the Associated Press's plans to track down people using its content. The flailing Encyclopedia Britannica was trying its hand at patent lawsuits, and reporters were getting mad at Google. Meanwhile, the intriguing drama around the AACS crack was continuing, while AACS was getting sued for patent infringement.