This Week In Techdirt History: February 9th – 15th
from the that-was-that dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz dropped a case after suing on behalf of the wrong party and trying to swap plaintiffs, while copyright troll Strike 3 got shut down by a judge and hit with $40k in legal fees. We looked at how US antitrust enforcement was clearly broken, and how the US broadband gaps were twice as bad as claimed. AT&T was pretending it wanted real net neutrality and privacy laws, and we wondered why Josh Hawley’s cures for big tech always omit big telecom. Also, we announced the winners of the second annual public domain game jam (the winners of this year’s jam are coming soon!)
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, Sega had to step in to clean up the mess caused by a content protection company making bogus ContentID claims, while Nintendo’s YouTuber affiliate plan was a bureaucratic mess of delays and control. Opponents of the FCC’s looming Title II net neutrality rules were ignoring history to make up reasons it wasn’t allowed, while Wall Street was telling the true story of whether anyone really believed net neutrality would harm broadband. Meanwhile, a magistrate judge shot down the government’s attempt to gag Yahoo indefinitely over grand jury subpoenas, while the court in Jewel v. NSA rejected the arguments from the EFF.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, Mathew Ingram presciently wondered whether news organizations would start demanding money from Facebook (as they were already increasingly going to war with news aggregators). We wrote about how ACTA was called an “executive agreement” to avoid the hassle of a treaty, and why it was still a dangerous deal even if it omitted filtering or three strikes requirements. Record labels decided to go for a third Jammie Thomas trial, an Australian court ruled that you can’t copyright facts so phone books are not protected, and the UK House of Lords had serious concerns about the Digital Economy Bill.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: February 9th – 15th”
A “copyright stroll”?
That’s where you come up with a new way to stroll and threaten to sue anyone who walks the same way.
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It worked with yoga… For a very little while.
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You can’t use anything from the Ministry of Silly Walks – those are all public domain.
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If all those walks are Public Domain, doesn’t that mean you can use them? Maybe you meant they’re all under Crown Copyright.
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Use for extracting rent, per the OP.
Yes, that was decidedly unclear.
Ahhh. The days of Liebowitz lighting himself on fire and then running through the courtroom all for our entertainment.
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Does him running through a courtroom after lighting himself on fire count as a copyright stroll?
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possibly. Especially if you filmed it.
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You can’t set yourself on fire in a crowded courtroom.
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Liebowitz: “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. I’m setting myself on fire in this crowded courtroom- and copyrighting my flaming stroll through as the bailiff reaches for the fire extinguisher”
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Great impression. If you had of added a bit about him dismissing all the previous times he’s been sanctioned for that exact behavior, it would have been perfect.
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Hmmm. Assuming that record wasn’t under seal, as a court proceeding, wouldn’t it have to be public domain?
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sotto voce Noteto self: i should tell Liebowitz what he can’t do more often.
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No, no, no. It goes: “You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ after setting yourself on fire in a crowded courtroom (because you clearly wanted to burn).”
The biggest travesty of the Liebowitz saga isn’t so much that he got away with it – certainly not to the degree Prenda Law did, or at least Liebowitz was smart enough not to brag about how much money he was raking in. No, the biggest travesty was how long it took for the judiciary to finally disbar him.
Plenty of copyright plaintiffs and their enforcement arms bemoan having to be treated with a fine-toothed comb, but really, the pendulum swinging in the other direction was a long time coming. We should not return to the days of guilt upon accusation to decide copyright infringement cases, and rightsholders are delusional if they think the rest of the world will go back to those RIAA-driven heydays.
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Which is why if plaintiff organizations want to insist on it being theft – “you wouldn’t steal a car”, then it should be a criminal trial with the rights accruing to the defendant, and guilt being determined beyond any reasonable doubt and to the exclusion of everything else. Can’t have your cake and eat it too
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Further, they want to make it a strict liability offense whereby if you can’t show you paid for the media (lost receipt for an old CD, for example), that’s all the evidence they need to show you “stole” the work in question.
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Still have to prove it in front of a judge and jurors. Wonder if these entitled copyright pricks actually can get twelve angry men to see things their way
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I see you don’t understand what the term strict liability means.
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They want to make it strict liability and also want it to be garden variety theft a la stealing a car. I’d go with the latter so that there is an element of stealing, but the buck stops with the thief. If you look up pirated material, freedom of speech should allow you to do that, and the proper authorities can capture arrest and indict the person upstream who made it all possible.
If someone is willing to risk imprisonment for this information, then it must be pretty damn important