This Week In Techdirt History: July 24th – 30th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, Senator Wyden was seeking answers about how many times Americans have been targeted by one of the least-discussed NSA surveillance programs, while we noted the silence from tech companies as the clock ticked down on Section 702 renewal (while newly released documents showed even more violations by the NSA). On another front, Wyden was arguing that the FCC is either incompetent or lying about the alleged DDoS attack, and Senator Markey was getting annoyed by Ajit Pai's justifications for killing net neutrality protections. Over 190 engineers and tech experts also signed a letter telling the FCC it was dead wrong about net neutrality.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the Wall Street Journal drew the ire of experts when it presented a terrible misrepresentation of the history of the internet, and didn't issue any corrections even after being told by Vint Cerf and Xerox that the story was just plain wrong. The Obama administration was still stalling a treaty designed to help the blind access copyrighted works, RIAA was working on its backdoor plan to use the six strikes" system to cut people off from the internet, and a court said the State Department could continue pretending documents leaked by Wikileaks were still secret. Meanwhile, the branches of the Mexican government were still fighting over their disagreement on ACTA.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, inventors and patent attorneys sued the USPTO over a supposedly unqualified appointment, the EFF sued Universal Music over a copyright takedown in what would come to be widely known as the Dancing Baby case, and Prince (who made the music at issue in that case) was embracing new music distribution strategies. The RIAA was pushing a study making the silly claim that radio is bad for music, while a proposed amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act would force colleges to do the RIAA's bidding or lose funding. Over in the UK, thankfully, the government rejected the idea of extending copyrights for performance royalties on songs.