This Week In Techdirt History: July 3rd – 9th

Techdirt

from the what-'twas dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the NSA was continuing to dodge questions about “incidental collection” while trying to get one of its surveillance programs back, and Twitter got to move forward in its First Amendment lawsuit over NSL reporting limitations. The House Appropriation Committee demolished Hollywood’s arguments for moving the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress, the State Department was enlisting Hollywood to help create a fake Twitter fight about IP, and we were disappointed to see Tim Berners-Lee officially support adding DRM to the HTML standard. Meanwhile, Bob Murray was trying to silence John Oliver while HBO moved the lawsuit to federal court.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, Congress was being even less curious about the NSA’s domestic spying, while Twitter followed in Google’s footsteps and launched its own Transparency Report. Verizon made a bizarre constitutional argument against net neutrality rules, while Ron and Rand Paul were saying some crazy things about both net neutrality and the public domain. ACTA supporters in Europe were fighting to the bitter end, but the European Parliament rejected the deal in a landslide. And, for the time being, Charles Carreon stopped digging and dismissed his lawsuit against Matthew Inman (while declaring “victory”).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, the NFL was playing the game of trying to dictate how fair use video long clips can be, Universal was threatening to take its music away from the iTunes store, and Russia shut down Allofmp3. The MPAA and RIAA were still up to their dirty investigative tricks, and the legal question of embedding infringing YouTube videos reared its head. Also, at the time, Wikipedia was still so widely maligned that it was noteworthy when the New York Times simply took a neutral stance on it.

Filed Under: history, look back