This Week In Techdirt History: January 1st – 7th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018 (yes, 2018 is now five years ago) Comcast rang in the new year with a flurry of price increases while we looked at what the death of net neutrality would bring as California joined the list of states proposing their own net neutrality rules. At the same time, the FCC was preparing to weaken the definition of broadband to hide issues with competition and coverage. Donald Trump hired Charles Harder to threaten Steve Bannon with a lawsuit, Germany's new hate speech law went into effect, a confused judge ruled that video game play has no copyright, and a white noise video on YouTube was hit with five separate copyright claims.
Also, for what was hopefully the last time (so far, so good) the US had zero new works enter the public domain. (Speaking of which, the following year, we would begin running our Public Domain Game Jam, and you should go join this year's edition).
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, when an expanding public domain was still a long way away, we took a look at how the Supreme Court helped create the problem. The liberation of Happy Birthday from copyright also still hadn't happened, so some folks were running a contest to find a replacement. As expected, the FTC closed its investigation into Google with no charges, though the settlement did still have at least one problem (or, in the eyes of Google's very angry competitors, lots of problems). Meanwhile, Prenda Law was trying to dismiss a case after it was accused of directly violating the judge's orders, and the lawyers who were going after Charles Carreon upped their request for attorney's fees.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, Australia was continuing down the slippery slope of internet censorship, while Japan was making its own big push to regulate the internet, and China was expanding its great firewall to require government licensing for all user-generated video sites (elsewhere, of course, user-generated video was at risk of private censorship thanks to copyright holders ignoring fair use). Digg and others were hit with lawsuits over an infamous computer solitaire patent, while it was open season on Vonage when it came to VoIP patents, but at least the EFF was out there doing the hard, slow work of busting bogus patents.