This Week In Techdirt History: January 14th – 20th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, an appeals court let the FBI off the hook for breaking the law during its Playpen investigation, while a federal judge said compelling people to unlock their phones with fingerprints or faces violates the Fifth Amendment, and another judge recommended vacating the sentence of one of the FBI's handcrafted terrorists. The EU Parliament put out some utter nonsense defending its Copyright Directive, while Hollywood asked the EU to drop Article 13 entirely over a tiny compromise it might contain, and soon it was clear that just about everyone agreed Article 13 was a disaster and the EU cancelled its final negotiations" on the directive due to lack of support.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, the latest revelation about the NSA was that they collect hundreds of millions of text messages daily, while NSA officials were showing just how much they hated Edward Snowden, and Obama was still planning cosmetic agency reforms. Also, to celebrate Copyright Week, we ran a series of special posts looking at a variety of subjects: why Hollywood and the USTR hate transparency, the amount of culture lost because of laws killing the public domain, the promise and potential of open access, the ways copyright is used to destroy property rights, and why fair use is an a rule not an exception.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, there was a copyright fight over fashion design and photography, Warner Music was continuing the trend of blocking innovation if it can't own a piece of it, and Psystar was still fighting against Apple. We also looked at how ASCAP and BMI were harming up-and-coming singers, how friendly DRM is an oxymoron, and the history of music copyright. Meanwhile, courts were serving up mixed decisions concerning police searches of your mobile phone on arrest, and the lawyer who sued Yelp over a review admitted he had no idea about Section 230 protections.