This Week In Techdirt History: September 9th – 16th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, ISPs were using new tactics to try to stop California's net neutrality bill on the home stretch, while California was also eyeing a more questionable bill to fix the internet of broken things, and Ajit Pai was falsely claiming that states are powerless to protect broadband consumers. We wrote about the misguided creators who support link taxes and mandatory filters, and the intellectual dishonesty of people who supported the current text of the EU Copyright Directive, but that directive was sadly embraced by the EU Parliament alongside an equally bad push for regulations about terrorism content".

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, the saga of the NSA leaks continued with details on the agency's economic espionage and man-in-the-middle attacks. EFF co-founder John Gilmore gave more details about how the NSA sabotaged a key security standard, while the NIST offered up a non-response to the previous revelation that the NSA had controlled the encryption standards-making process (with Canada's help, as it turned out). Meanwhile, James Clapper declassified FISA documents while pretending it wasn't because of the EFF's lawsuit, and those documents revealed how the NSA had engaged in privacy-violating domestic metadata searches for three straight years, and that the agency didn't consider abuses to be abuses.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, CBS went to court to tell the NFL that you can't copyright player statistics, the MPAA was claiming the ability to regulate internet advertising, and Google appeared to be removing private videos for copyright infringement. Thousands of anti-Scientology videos were taken down from YouTube via the DMCA, Disney joined the fight to convince UK ISPs to kick file sharers off the internet, and RealNetworks was picking a fight with Hollywood. And while the UK continued to overreact to the torrent tracker site OiNK, isoHunt was seeking declaratory judgement in Canada that torrent tracking is legal.