This Week In Techdirt History: February 7th – 13th
from the when-will-they-learn dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2011, we saw some great stuff. David Guetta suggested “beating” piracy by embracing free music; Neil Gaiman explained how he went from fearing piracy to believing it’s incredibly good; the Khan Academy was moving to leverage the power of BitTorrent; and a study from the Japanese government showed that anime piracy might be boosting sales.
But, on the flipside, we saw even more awful stuff. One rapper sued multiple companies for giving him lots of free promotion; the MPAA was lobbing all sorts of threats at Google over file sharing and suing Hotfile; a report from the IP Czar sounded like it was largely written by pro-copyright lobbyists; and Sony was going nuts over the PS3 jailbreak video, demanding the identity of anyone who watched it even while being tricked into tweeting the critical jailbreak code itself.
Ten Years Ago
Five extra years doesn’t seem to change much. This week in 2006, even while some artists were realizing you could make money giving away free music and the evidence was showing that movie piracy doesn’t reduce sales, plenty of people were still trying to fight this imagined enemy with restrictive licensing terms that kill the value of the product and set-top movie boxes that cost a fortune despite not offering much.
Newsweek, for some reason, was praising Rupert Murdoch as a digital visionary based largely on News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace (which went wonderfully, right?) One look at MTV’s efforts to compete was enough of a reminder that old media really struggles to “get” new media.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2001, Napster was in limbo. It was unclear when its paid, licensed offerings would be arriving, while some were still arguing that it should remain free. Then the word came down that the final ruling on Napster from the 9th Circuit would be arriving the following Monday (so we’ll check in on that next week, naturally).
Wi-Fi was on the rise, but still had some security-related kinks to work out, and mobile innovation was orbiting the still-unborn iPhone with ersatz mashups of PDAs and phones. E-books were starting to make their mark, online shopping seemed due for its true rise, and home networks remained less common than anticipated.
Also, in one of the first instances of a point we’d go on to make many times, we pointed out that content isn’t necessarily king, and connectivity matters a lot.
One-Hundred And Eighteen Years Ago
The justice system, the government, the national security apparatus, the media, the public, espionage, free speech, libel — they are all intersecting topics of interest here at Techdirt, and perhaps no incident in history brings them all together in as sharp a focus as France’s Dreyfus Affair. The details of this infamous miscarriage of justice are far too numerous and intricate to recount here, but one of the most important aspects of the whole thing was J’Accuse, an essay published by Émile Zola as a direct attack on the government, which landed him on trial for defamation starting on February 7th, 1898.
