This Week In Techdirt History: December 2nd – 8th
from the reflections dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2013, we saw a spate of worrying changes around the world, with a German court telling Wikimedia that it’s liable for user content, a French court ordering a search engine to make an entire website disappear over copyright infringement, and Italian politicians looking to have copyright handled by regulators, not courts — but at least in the UK, a court was also ruling that software functionality is not subject to copyright. Back in the US, just before the MPAA reached a settlement with Hotfile that would assuredly not actually help any artists, the agency was surprisingly told it couldn’t use the words “piracy”, “theft” or “stealing” during the trial. And there were developments in two major long-term IP court battles, with the appeals court overturning the ruling exempting APIs from copyright in the Oracle/Google case, and the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Alice software patent case.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2008, before Denuvo became the leading name in the useless and annoying DRM world, it was SecuROM driving gamers nuts while failing to stop pirates — and so nobody was happy when RockStar decided to use it for Grand Theft Auto (apparently having learned nothing from seeing the high-profile failure of Spore’s DRM). Warner Music was trying to talk universities into making students pay a piracy tax, while copyright apologists were arguing that schools which refuse to do so were protecting “terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves”. The MPAA, meanwhile, was trying to claim that its desire for selectable output control on media devices was a pro-innovation stance being opposed only by the luddites at the CEA…
We also saw a few key copyright developments in the courtroom: the banning of Bratz dolls (we covered this fascinating fight in a podcast this year), and Joe Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2003, the spam wars heated up as the world headed into the holiday shopping season, with spammers using new techniques to get around filters and even designing extensive spam campaigns just to annoy and hinder anti-spam companies — which were themselves becoming a lucrative industry. Alongside all this, we were beginning to realize just how much spam was coming from networks of hijacked computers. Meanwhile, with every damn tech company trying to launch an online music store, even Hewlett Packard was trying to get in on the action, while the RIAA was filing more insane filsharing lawsuits including one infamously targeting a 79-year-old retiree with no computer.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: December 2nd – 8th”
Read 5 years ago, pirates, then TRY to boast more.
Just 5 years ago, pirates were still bragging that torrents were unstoppable, as were the file hosts. Today, a glance at Torrent Freak will show you that Law is ever more firmly behind those who produce content.
Pirates are losing.
Even the site is down to about a third of former boastage: ranks below 10000, rarely even a hundred comments per topic, and most of those due to same half dozen.
Also note that I’ve suppressed Zombies of late: "accounts" that have characteristics of name change shortly after first, and LONG gaps — up to 8 years! Sheer astro-turfing. We don’t know how long that’s been going on, but for sure the claim of 57000 readers a day isn’t accurate: it’d be less than 0.1% commenting. Page views, maybe.
Re: Re:
Torrentfreak… the site that first broke the Strike 3 story of the judge blasting your heroes for using him as their personal ATM? Yeah… you’re “winning”, keep telling yourself that.
SESTA voted!
Re: Read 5 years ago, pirates, then TRY to boast more.
out_of_the_blue just hates it when due process is enforced.