This Week In Techdirt History: February 11th – 17th

Techdirt

from the and-then-what-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the EU was stalwartly moving forward with Article 13 as part of its terrible copyright directive. Trump was preparing to ban Huawei, Monster Energy lost its trademark fight with Mosta Pizza, and a lawsuit against Bloomberg brought the “hot news doctrine” back into the conversation. A report showed that ICE almost never punished its contractors despite many violations, while key FOSTA supporter Cindy McCain claimed credit for stopping sex trafficking after misidentifying a child. A judge in Minnesota spent only minutes approving warrants to sweep up thousands of cellphone users, someone impersonated the New Jersey Attorney General to demand a takedown of 3D-printed gun instructions, and Sony was using copyright claims to take down its own anti-piracy propaganda.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, government officials were leaking classified info to journalists in order to discredit Snowden for doing that very thing, while Snowden was expressing his willingness to answer questions from the European Parliament. US copyright lobbyists equated fair dealing with piracy, MPAA boss Chris Dodd was pretending to be ready to discuss copyright reform, details emerged about ASCAP screwing over Pandora, and a bunch of musicians joined forces to fight against compulsory licenses for remixes. This was also the week that the world was briefly confused, and amused, by the appearance and then rapid disappearance of Nathan Fielder’s “Dumb Starbucks”.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, the biggest viral hit was the recording of Christian Bale rampaging on the set of a movie, and the director suggested Warner Bros might try to abuse copyright to suppress the clip. Dianne Feinstein was trying to sneak ISP copyright filtering into a broadband stimulus bill, the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden was set to be broadcast online, ASCAP was continuing its attacks against Lawrence Lessig and free culture, an EU Committee ignored all the research and approved copyright extension, and we learned about how US IP interests pressured Canada to join the WTO fight against China. We also had some questions about the curious fact that Google launched Android without multitouch functionality, while concerns were mounting over Google’s book search settlement.

Filed Under: history, look back