This Week In Techdirt History: August 14th – 20th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the FCC unveiled its new broadband advisory panel" that was stocked with telecom consultants, allies, and cronies, and got to work weakening the definition of quality broadband, while a former Commissioner was trying to claim that net neutrality aided the rise of white supremacy. A Florida city was ignoring all legal precedent in an attempt to identify and silence a critic, a court smacked down a silly argument claiming Yahoo had lost Section 230 immunity, and we had a discussion on the podcast about SESTA and why 230 matters. Also, Mike won an EFF Pioneer Award.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, we listed seven reasons that Google was making a mistake by agreeing to filter searches based on DMCA notices, while a new TED talk by Kirby Ferguson offered a compelling explanation of how copyright and patent laws conflict with creativity. SurfTheChannel owner Anton Vickerman was sentenced to four years in prison for conspiracy", label funds to RIAA were drying up, the next TPP negotiation session was arranged with only three hours allotted to talk to public interest advocates, and Universal Music used a bogus DMCA claim to take down a negative review of Drake's album.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, Google decided to kill of its DRM video service and disappear the videos people thought they had purchased, Time Warner was working on enabling time shifting but without the ability to fast forward, and Limewire became the latest P2P company to try to go legit. A whole host of companies including Diebold and Disney were caught editing Wikipedia entries in their favor, while a Skype outage highlighted the fact that Skype was more centralized than expected. The RIAA was ignoring a court ruling over a bogus suit and not paying the legal fees it was ordered to pay, while we saw two very different responses to being faced with one of the agency's suits: Tonya Andersen was trying to turn her own lawsuit against the RIAA's practices into a class action, while Michelle Santangelo went the route of suing Kazaa, AOL, and anyone else she could think of because the RIAA sued her.