This Week In Techdirt History: July 19th – 25th

Five Years Ago

Although there's no joy in thinking about the Supreme Court right now, it offered a mixed bag of decisions this week in 2017 that should be highlighted: it reminded the government that hate speech is 1A protected, it declined to hear the Dancing Baby copyright case despite the government's admission of serious legal error", it made it even more difficult to sue federal officials for rights violations, and it ruled that you can't just ban people from the internet entirely (which presented a problem for Hollywood's plans). Meanwhile, this was also the week that coal CEO Bob Murray threatened John Oliver with a lawsuit, then quickly made good on his threat with a filing that was even sillier than we expected.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, we saw a renewed final push for ACTA, a TPP proposal leak exposing America's plans to give multinational corporations tremendous power, and yet another UK copyright extension proposal. But the most memorable incident was the continued saga of Charles Carreon and The Oatmeal: Carreon's full legal filing revealed all sorts of nuttiness, and then he doubled down in an insane way by promising to subpoena Twitter and Ars Technica to track down a parody account mocking him.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, NBC was trying to get the FCC to force ISPs to police their networks for copyright infringement, we wondered why the entertainment industry gets to decide whether DVD copying is legal, and a terrible Australian defamation ruling was a big hit to restaurant reviewers. We got another look at the scammy practices of printer and ink sellers, and watched the rise in popularity of webcam-based anti-cheating systems for students taking tests online. Meanwhile, lest you forget and think this is a new issue, broadband providers were fighting against the push for FCC to collect better broadband availability data.