This Week In Techdirt History: December 18th – 24th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2017, the chips started to fall in the wake of the net neutrality appeal. A tonedeaf video starring Ajit Pai led to one of those internet situations where everyone is wrong, while Pai was insisting net neutrality supporters were wrong about everything since Twitter hadn't immediately died. Comcast began its push for a terrible new net neutrality law in earnest, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn was right on cue with a bill to make the FCC's decision permanent. The NAACP did an about face on net neutrality, while CenturyLink pivoted to asking the FCC to police interconnection. And, shocking nobody, a FOIA request revealed that yet another core justification for the repeal was bullshit.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2012, the MPAA was touting the millions of DMCA requests that Google receives as proof that it needs to do more to stop piracy, RIAA lawyers were trying to rewrite the history of the copyright clause with bad scholarship, and the Obama administration was gearing up to appoint Hollywood donors as ambassadors. In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, pundits and politicians hit the ground running with the narrative that video game and movie violence are to blame, happily joined by the NRA of course. And the Prenda saga continued, with the firm accused of trying to start over again under a new name while working on some new tricks for trying to get info on IP addresses.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2007, we saw a notable ruling in Vermont about constitutional protections for a person's encryption key, and an interesting case about whether a computer store tech can open and look at your files, while Yahoo China was found guilty of copyright infringement for linking to MP3s, and TorrentSpy lost the first round of its case against the MPAA for all the wrong reasons. There was also an interesting lawsuit against a blogger that combined many interesting legal issues. Meanwhile, we wrote about the myth of balance" in copyright, and the need for our society to wean itself off its unhealthy addiction to using copyright as a crutch.