This Week In Techdirt History: April 28th – May 4th
from the that-was-that dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, Texas began pushing its bill that would allow the state to sue Twitter for banning conservatives, while Facebook filed a questionable lawsuit over fake followers and likes, and a New York saxophonist became the latest to join the bandwagon of suing Fortnite developers. The Supreme Court asked the White House to weigh in on the copyrightability of APIs, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling that got Section 230 right. And while Congress was pushing a terrible bill to massively expand patent trolling, we looked at another frontier for bad IP verdicts: the world of trade secrets.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, Keith Alexander faced his toughest interview yet… at the hands of comedian John Oliver. Voltage Pictures was abusing trademark law to go after downloaders, while we looked at the vicious cycle of trademark abuse, and lawsuits accusing copyright trolls of extortion were proving successful. Senators Feinstein and Chambliss were taking another crack at a cybersecurity bill, while also letting James Clapper talk them out of requiring transparency around drone strikes. We also heard one of the dumbest ideas about the future of the movie business: that pricing would be based on the size of a viewer’s screen.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2009, we wrote about the misplaced sense of entitlement that was so dominant in the recording and newspaper industries in the internet age, while music and book publishers in Germany were demanding ISPs block file sharing sites, Google was denying similarities to The Pirate Bay, and the USTR was fearmongering about Canadian piracy. The conditions placed on a former RIAA lawyer who joined the DOJ provided yet another look at how fast the revolving door spins, and Warner Music picked a bad fight by issuing a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation. And as a reminder that things don’t necessarily change that much, we looked at a newspaper article panicking about sheet music piracy in 1897.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: April 28th – May 4th”
Thoughts
Thought 1: It’s been only ten years since John Oliver’s interview with Keith Alexander? Time sure flies…
Thought 2: The sense of entitlement of the News industry led to the abominable link taxes around the world. The recording industry got back on its feet thanks to streaming and–unlike the film/video industry, didn’t exclusively make their product available on only one service nor make DRM-free purchases unavailable. As you can see now, the Music Recording Industry is in the black whilst the Video/Film industry has faced an uptick of piracy.
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Your blog has become an indispensable resource for me. I’m always excited to see what new insights you have to offer. Thank you for consistently delivering top-notch content!
The sad thing about 15 years ago is that I definitely know people who used to pirate and stopped when Spotify and various streaming services for movies came along. But, between price hikes, Prime asking for extra money to not show ads, Netflix cracking down on sharing, and the general fragmentation where you have to hunt endlessly to see the title you want to see… the high seas are becoming more popular.
I understand why the ideal consumer product isn’t available (everything ever made available for a single cheap monthly price). It’s just sad that so much was done to address the reasons for piracy, then everyone decided to try and extort and restrict instead of allow access. I can even name several titles I’m literally not allowed to access legally, yet there would be complaints if I pirated them.
Re:
As I said in my comment above, the music streaming services aren’t nickel-and-diming consumers the same way the video streaming services are, and that’s why piracy is a more attractive alternative for video but not for music, and the major labels have made back all the money they have lost to piracy and then some, while for video, it’s flatlined. My source is the Copia Institute’s 2024 The Sky is Rising report, seen here: https://copia.is/library/the-sky-is-rising-2024/
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I worked for Twitter
I worked for twitter for 8 years, and now that the lawsuit it settled, I can speak about this. We did indeed limit conservative speech. Fuck yeah we did. Fuck Trump. We all wanted Hilary and Biden to win. We did everything we could to shift the narrative towards liberal views. And we won. Fuck those conservative backwards fascists.