This Week In Techdirt History: December 31st – January 6th

Techdirt

from the a-new-year-dawns dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we kicked off the new year with a copyright lawsuit over dance moves in Fortnite, while the EU made its first attempt at listing pirate sites and included a bunch of non-infringing sites. Similarly, we looked at how antipiracy outfits routinely claim copyright infringement against sites that simply report when torrents are released. Ajit Pai was gloating about Congress’s failure to restore net neutrality, and soon after the FCC was mostly shuttered when the government entered a partial shutdown. And the week that began with a dance copyright fight ended with a viral video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends, which itself sparked some interesting copyright conversations.

Ten Years Ago

This week at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, a judge issued the landmark ruling saying that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. Meanwhile, the fight over NSA surveillance continued as leaked documents showed the scope of the agency’s efforts to compromise hardware and communication technology. The ACLU filed a new lawsuit over the agency’s biggest loophole, while a French telco was planning to sue over the tapping of its undersea cables. The New York Times was arguing forcefully for Edward Snowden to be offered clemency, an idea that Michael Hayden called “outrageous” (unsurprisingly, given the recent clip of him calling Snowden a traitor). And then the FISA court rubberstamped yet another renewal of the NSA’s power to collect phone data.

Fifteen Years Ago

The weeks and the holidays fall in such a way that all our posts from “this week” fifteen years ago still end up coming from the tail end of 2008, rather than 2009. We wrote about the copyright dispute over The Watchmen movie, and the reaction of Warner Music artists to the label’s fight with YouTube, while the legal team from Harvard challenging the RIAA’s file sharing lawsuits was asking to allow live broadcast of the Tenenbaum case. The MPAA was getting bebhind the RIAA’s new plan to make ISPs into copyright enforcers, and we looked at the expiry of copyright on Popeye in the UK as a test case for the big Mickey Mouse day that has finally come all these years later.

Filed Under: history, look back