This Week In Techdirt History: July 16th – 22nd

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was pretending to care about the identity fraud that plagued the net neutrality repeal, Netflix's CEO was proclaiming the death of net neutrality to be no big deal, while the government in India was moving in the opposite direction and embracing full net neutrality (though the effort to restore it in the US got its first support form a House Republican). FIFA gave us the latest example of copyright as censorship, while an episode of our podcast looked at how private agreements had recreated SOPA. And EPIC Games pushed forward in its quest to sue a 14-year-old for cheating in Fortnite.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, yet another constitutional scholar came forward to explain why NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, while we got a glimpse of the agency's collect it all" approach to data. We continued to offer explanations and examples of why metadata collection isn't harmless and noted that, after all, tech companies weren't allowed to share just metadata" about NSA surveillance. The author of the Patriot Act threatened not to renew it if intelligence agencies didn't change their ways, the FISA court rubber stamped the continued collection of all phone records, and the EFF (joined by many other groups) filed a massive lawsuit over surveillance.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, we got some insight into Viacom's demand for Google log files as the company showed great interest in knowing what Google employees were uploading and viewing, while the two companies came to an agreement about anonymizing" data and needed to be reminded that there's no such thing. The EU was back to considering extending copyright and turning the system into welfare for musicians, Apple finally sued Psystar for selling Mac clones, and a ruling in Blizzard's lawsuit against a World of Warcraft bot maker set a dangerous precedent. Meanwhile, we offered up a detailed explanation of how the BSA misleads people with its bogus piracy stats.