This Week In Techdirt History: October 8th – 14th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, a federal court dumped another lawsuit accusing Twitter of contributing to worldwide terrorism, a law firm made the stupid decision to threaten Somthing Awful over a hot-linked picture, and it appeared that Epic Games DMCA'd its own Fortnite trailer. Washington State laughed at the federal attack on net neutrality, while we looked at the lies in the FCC's court filing, and 34 state AGs demanded the FCC do more to end robocalls. Meanwhile, the government moved to seize all of Backpage's assets prior to securing convictions, while Facebook was reaping what it sowed as it got sued under FOSTA.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, the US government was shut down, with predictably wide-ranging fallout. The TSA blamed the shutdown for allowing a nine-year-old to sneak onto a flight, Russian pirates offered to host NASA's website, a former CIA director used the shutdown as an excuse for skipping a surveillance review board meeting, the lawsuit from tech companies over NSA transparency was put on hold... and the special members-only gym for Congress was deemed essential and kept open. Meanwhile, we looked at the MPAA's problematic claims in the IsoHunt lawsuit, and the history of technologies sued by legacy content companies, while Intellectual Ventures was reaching new lows in its tactics.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, we continued to look at the causes of the global financial crisis (as well as the not-actual-causes being bandied about including a very silly notion from author Tom Wolfe) and pointed to This American Life's now-legendary episodes about the financial system as an excellent primary. We also looked at an interesting comparison between the mortgage bubble and the patent bubble. A judge let the antitrust trial over the iPhone move forward, and we dug into the ridiculous history of the job and dollar loss figures cited by IP proponents. Also, long before the Snowden revelations, we got an earlier look at the NSA's abuse of its wiretapping programs.