This Week In Techdirt History: February 27th – March 5th
from the old-posts-on-a-new-site dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2017, new FCC boss Ajit Pai was getting down to work: moving to kill broadband privacy protections, falsely claiming benefits from his attacks on net neutrality (which he also called a mistake), and scaling back rules that forced ISPs to be clear about usage caps and hidden fees. On another front, the new boss of the DOJ said he hadn’t read the department’s investigations about abusive police, and called them ‘anecdotal’. Meanwhile, the term “fake news” had predictably spun out of control, Sony and Microsoft were lobbying against right to repair bills, and Tim Berners-Lee disappointed many by endorsing the addition of DRM to the HTML5 standard.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2012, we saw a pair of parallel examples of ridiculous copyright abuse. In the first, a YouTube user got a ContentID claim over the sound of birds singing in the background, leading the claimant to attribute the fiasco to a series of unfortunate errors. The second hit a little closer to home: one of Techdirt’s most important posts about SOPA/PIPA was censored from Google results by a bogus DMCA takedown, similarly garnering the response that it was all a mistake. Meanwhile, we took a look at whether the Megaupload shutdown had benefited the entertainment industry, and wondered why ICANN wasn’t speaking out against the ICE/DOJ domain seizures.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2007, the first Tech Policy Summit in San Jose featured Howard Berman blaming the pharmaceutical industry for holding up patent reform, while a panel on patents at the summit was struggling to offer any real solutions. The panel was followed by the CEO of Autodesk parroting the BSA line on software piracy. Meanwhile, a true attempt at fixing the problems with the DMCA was introduced to congress in the form of the FAIR USE Act, while Republican lawmakers were forced to withdraw some accusations of piracy they lobbed at Nancy Pelosi. Also, the MPAA was tragically misunderstanding the power of internet video by pulling down all clips of the Oscars, while the RIAA was officially commencing its new strategy of offering “discounted settlements” in its mass legal threats.
