This Week In Techdirt History: November 12th – 18th
from the such-as-it-was dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, the RIAA made a court filing where it warned about overprotection from copyright, Nintendo secured a huge settlement against ROM site (probably just to scare other ROM sites), and the Girl Scouts sued the Boy Scouts over trademark. CNN filed a lawsuit seeking to show that Trump can’t kick reporters out for asking tough questions, a judge allowed the NRA’s first amendment lawsuit against Andrew Cuomo to move forward, and we lamented the fact that the Conan O’Brien joke-stealing lawsuit was still going on. Meanwhile, the EU Council got explicit in its push for mandatory upload filters and we urged them not to wreck the internet.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, polls showed that less than 20% of Americans believed the NSA had adequate oversight, while the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected a bunch of attempts to amend Dianne Feinstein’s fake NSA reform bill, and we noted that Feinstein received a lot of cash from intelligence contractors. We learned more about Paul Hansmeier’s ADA lawsuits, namely that they were filed without knowledge of the plaintiffs (and he soon dismissed one of them) while Comcast and AT&T were looking to get their cut of legal fees from Prenda. Also, a leak gave us a look at the IP chapter of the TPP agreement, and confirmed that it was even worse than ACTA.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, there were reports that some students were dropping out of school in order to pay RIAA settlement fees, the French recording industry sued SourceForge for hosting open source P2P software, and the Turkish city of Batman threatened to sue Christopher Nolan over Batman the movie. The judge from the Napster lawsuit was recommending a massive bureaucracy as the way to fix copyright, the EU was continuing to give bogus reasons for keeping ACTA secret, and we looked at whether new SEC rules about linking violated Section 230 safe harbors. And we praised an excellent viral essay by Cory Doctorow about how copyright harms culture.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: November 12th – 18th”
Some ad bots are leveraging AI to scrape articles to look like summary responses… others, not so much. But at least even the most transparent ad bot is still far more honest than the average copyright maximalist.