This Week In Techdirt History: December 17th – 23rd
from the so-it-was dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, a bunch of entertainment industry lobbyists were given a chance to pay $5000 to attend the Grammys with two congressmen, an appeals court handed another loss to MP3 reseller ReDigi, and copyright lobbyists were failing to keep their story straight on the EU Copyright Directive (the problems of which were being aptly demonstrated by the failures of YouTube’s $100 million upload filter). An FCC Commissioner was continuing to rail against community broadband, a report exposed the manifold problems with CBP’s border device search program, and ICE seized over a million websites with no due process. Also, Buzzweed won the defamation lawsuit brought against it over publication of the Steele Dossier.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, a judge issued an injunction against the NSA’s bulk metadata collection, IBM was sued by shareholders for cooperating with the NSA, and seven members of the House Judiciary were demanding the DOJ investigate James Clapper for lying to Congress (while Rep. Peter King said calling out Clapper was a disgrace). CBS aired some NSA propaganda masquerading as journalism, the Wall Street Journal called Edward Snowden a sociopath, and tonedeaf NSA officials told a reporter it’s time to reform the First Amendment. Meanwhile, the CIA was still fighting to block release of the infamous torture report.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, EMI was claiming copyright on Coldplay/Joe Satriani mashup videos, the RIAA was continuing to sue students for file sharing, and Hasbro finally dropped its lawsuit over Scrabulous. There was a strange IP-adjacent fight over plans to build a replica Taj Mahal, copyright cops were crashing weddings in Spain to find evidence of music being played, and UK DVD and CD retailers were giving more bogus predictions about job losses caused by piracy. We also wrote about how the Lori Drew ruling could put more kids at risk, and wondered why the EU was funding a project to create new methods for DRM.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: December 17th – 23rd”
Ah, yes, that famous ground-breaking media outlet, Buzzweed.
Maybe a Freudian slip, Leigh?
Article 13/17 were weird, frankly. They were simultaneously promised to make meaningful changes to copyright enforcement while also somehow not have any effect on the average user, which runs counter to all the claims that pro-copyright interests have consistently made over the years – in that a significant portion of people, if not everyone, infringes on copyright and that has to stop, otherwise there’d be no reason for them to be bringing such laws in the first place.
Of course, they say the same thing about every law and campaign from “Home Taping is Killing Music” to SOPA and ACTA, then get angry and confused when they meet resistance. So they tried to get around it by insisting that everything would be completely transparent, then quietly made sure that the final vote that mattered was held behind closed doors and declared that whoopsy-daisy, the lawmakers went ahead and approved Article 13/17 after all.
And for a hot moment, copyright interests did look like they had gotten away with it at long last, after the disastrously unceremonious demise of SOPA in 2012. What they hadn’t counted on was the EU actually giving a damn about user privacy and protection, and asking very difficult and annoying questions on how this stronger copyright enforcement could happen – like preemptively recognizing copyrighted content and deleting it before it ever got uploaded. Naturally the pro-copyright interests had no answer; they’d always relied on the abilities and resources of “big tech”, that nebulous organization that they’d loathed and leaned on for the longest time. And no amount of math or “nerding harder” could magically create tech that would give copyright interests the results they were looking for. And what would it matter anyway, when innocence or guilt was never a priority for copyright holders to begin with? What did it matter to them where their pound of flesh was coming from, so long as they got it?
Thus Article 13/17 was a quiet victory for the copyright lobby, even though in a sense, they were right – it wouldn’t affect the average user, because the law stood no chance of being enforced the way that copyright interests wanted it to. Meanwhile their reputation to the average Internet user continues to straddle between rock bottom and stale dogshit.