This Week In Techdirt History: September 3rd – 9th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, despite the best efforts of lobbyists, California passed its net neutrality law and sent it to the governor's desk, while at the federal level, Ajit Pai was busy coddling big telecom and demonizing big tech. The automated DMCA systems of Hollywood studios were targeting IMDb for some reason, one ROM site was fighting back against Nintendo's takedowns, Wikimedia was warning about the dangers of the EU Copyright Directive, and the Ninth Circuit denied an en banc review of the Monkey Selfie case. We were also surprised and amused when Google flagged our post about the impossibility of content moderation as dangerous or derogatory content.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, Edward Snowden won a whistleblowing award while the latest reporting on his leaks revealed that the NSA and GCHQ recruited telco employees to insert encryption backdoors, and that the feds had begged the newspapers not to reveal this fact. We wrote about how the NSA's overreach would make its job much more difficult, while Obama was still maintaining that the checks and balances worked great overall. In non-NSA news, Warner Music was stepping up and fighting to keep Happy Birthday out of the public domain, TPP negotiators were doubling down on secrecy in a desperate attempt to sew up the agreement, and UK record companies were trying to bring in a voluntary three strikes system to punish file sharers.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, there was still a persistent myth that the internet might run out of bandwidth, even though that was nowhere near the case. Google shook up the app ecosystem by announcing the Android Market with a lower barrier to entry than the App Store, while we wrote about whether or not Amazon could open up its walled garden. And an appeals court told Homeland Security that they can't refuse asylum to a refugee solely on the basis of Wikipedia, while we noted the growth of police using GPS data to determine where people were.