This Week In Techdirt History: August 27th – September 2nd
from the do-you-remember? dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, a security flaw at Charter Spectrum exposed the private data of millions of subscribers, while Big Telecom was trying out new tactics in its fight against net neutrality in California. An appeals court ruled that forcing someone to unlock their phone violates the fifth amendment, while another ruled that an IP address alone is insufficient for infringement claims. Danish ISPs scored a win against copyright trolling, while the EU Copyright Directive continued to be a threat to the public domain, as well as bringing the nightmare of link taxes.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, we learned that the NSA had bugged the UN and various EU embassies, and then we got a look at the “black budget” that funded surveillance as well as, it turned out, a major focus on cracking encryption. Meanwhile, a bad court ruling said cyberlocker Hotfile and its owner could be liable for copyright infringement by users, and we wrote about the worrying statistic that half of all retiring Senators go on to become lobbyists, then quickly got a related example when the White House’s IP Czar jumped ship to the BSA.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, we wrote about how the benefits of piracy aren’t always in the expected places. A lawyer in the UK offered to represent falsely accused file sharers for free, while the subject of a RIAA lawsuit lost… thanks to evidence destruction. Mattel followed in the footsteps of Hasbro and forced Scrabulous offline in the areas where it owned the rights to Scrabble, AMC attacked (then backed off from) Mad Men fan accounts on Twitter, and more academics joined the crowd criticizing the EU’s push for copyright extension.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: August 27th – September 2nd”
It really has been five years before John Smith started unraveling at the seams, hasn’t it? Of course, not much can match up to the time he well and truly lost his shit during the Strike 3 reminder of 2019, but this still manages to pass for a pretty epic meltdown. Guy really thought that “But if you don’t let me submit my shitty evidence I can’t sell my self-help books” was a good reason for the government to force people to buy his content for “Six figures”.
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Wasn’t it also revealed he was using those “self-help books” to harvest confidential data that he tried to sell?
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Not exactly, but he did bitch and moan a lot about “pirates stealing his mailing lists” and preventing him from leveraging off that subscriber information, not that there was a lot of it to start with according to him. Which isn’t surprising, when you consider what the market is like for people willing to pay “six figures” for self-help information.
Realistically he’d have had a better case whining about Meta and Google for using algorithms that direct his clientele to other, better recommendations. Guy actually thought others would buy his claim that pirates were competing with Google selling his precious collection of private info on folks he’s managed to sucker.
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John Smith never had a case because his entire story is predicated on claims that simultaneously make him the strongest and the most helpless person in the world all at the same time.
He’s claimed to be productive enough to write libraries’ worth of self-help and financial investment information that has managed to become completely obsolete by the time he got to publish it, blaming pirates instead of the publishing process for why it took so long.
He’s insisted that he’s a writer living it up in Hollywood where studios respectfully defer to him, but can’t cite any of the works he’s actually contributed to because pirates stole his attribution.
He’s regularly made threats about police investigations and media leaks about Mike Masnick, but for some reason just can’t touch the pirates who allegedly stole his content in the first place despite all the legal resources at his disposal. Pirates, who he regularly denigrates as nerds and losers living in their parents’ basements, are apparently protected by entities so deeply entrenched that he can’t touch them even though he probably knows their names.
The truth is that Jhon Smith’s claims have always been nothing more than desperate, hateful fanfiction. If Jhon boi had even a tenth of the influence he says he has he’d have played the Shiva Ayyadurai strategy a long time ago. Instead the best he’s got is creating throwaway accounts named F230 and JhonSmith3rd just to scream obscenities on a site he personally claimed, multiple times, that nobody reads but somehow facilitates mass financial fraud despite the low traffic.
Copyright law’s fucking best and brightest…
A Pity
It’s a pity those academics in Europe back in 2008 wasted their time opposing what the counsel had clearly already decided on. So not only was less academia performed that year and what there was will be locked up for longer.