This Week In Techdirt History: November 24th – 30th
from the thanks-for-the-memories dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2014, the war on encryption continued with the NSA Director fearmongering about a pending cyberattack, backed up by a misinformed WSJ op-ed, as we looked at how encryption back doors could harm intelligence gathering and military operations. The net neutrality attacks were also coming strong, with a misleading poll propping up the partisan divide, CenturyLink defending its lobbying for protectionist state laws, and Mark Cuban jumping on the bandwagon despite apparently not understanding what net neutrality is. Meanwhile, Nielsen finally caught up to reality and started trying to track streaming viewers after years of denying the existence of cord-cutting.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2009, while the heads of major movie studios were claiming that they just wanted to help indie filmmakers with their anti-piracy demands, others were seeing that movie piracy is largely the studios’ fault (inasmuch as it’s a problem at all) and new research was continuing to show how copying and imitation is good for society. Senators were beginning to question the secrecy of the ACTA negotiations, and we were noticing the inconsistency between companies’ support for ACTA and support for a treaty providing more access to content for the visually impaired.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2004, we were wondering (with some perhaps-undue optimism…) whether the entertainment industry was losing its political power. BT was trying to get in on the extremely crowded music download store market, Radiohead was disappointingly charging fees for quoting its music even in clear cases of fair use, and one judge was thankfully telling the MPAA to slow down with the John Doe lawsuits. Meanwhile, UK drivers were ignoring driving-while-yakking laws just like everyone else, people were twisting the results of a study showing the educational benefits of computers to their phone ringing, and the problem of patent hoarding was getting enough attention to even show up in USA Today.
