This Week In Techdirt History: July 30th – August 5th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, not long after the settlement in the Dancing Baby case, Universal was straight back to issuing DMCA takedowns, this time over a reporter's video of Prince fans singing Purple Rain (though it didn't take long for them to back down). Sony found itself in court after bullying a film studio over supposed Slender Man" copyright infringement, another court awarded a defendant $12,500 for emotional harm" from a bogus copyright lawsuit, and major record labels were sensing blood in the water and closing in on Cox for ignoring" DMCA notices. Meanwhile, the Inspector General reported that the NSA still hadn't implemented its post-Snowden internal security measures. Which brings us to...
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, the fallout from the Snowden leaks was still in full swing. Keith Alexander kicked off lobbying calls to congress with a rather ill-considered joke, while the tide in congress was shifting against NSA surveillance (as was public opinion). Senators were unimpressed with James Clapper's carefully worded responses to their questions about surveillance, and the DOJ told Ron Wyden that James Comey had no intention of answering more questions. Wyden was joined by Mark Udall in clearly stating that the government was not being honest about the NSA, and Patrick Leahy called bullshit on the claim that metadata collection had stopped terrorist attacks. Their point was well illustrated by a video from ProPublica rounding up all the lies the government was telling.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, the still-clueless MPAA was claiming that The Dark Knight's success at the box office could be attributed to anti-piracy efforts, the IFPI was admitting a mistake in a nastygram it sent to a music blogger, and the RIAA was told (yet again) to pay the legal fees of one of its lawsuit targets, while another defendant in a copyright lawsuit admitted to file sharing and challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Act. The MPAA also kicked off two new lawsuits that would test the question of whether embedding could be infringement, and we wondered if anyone had an example of a time when suing for copyright infringement made business sense.