This Week In Techdirt History: July 13th – 19th

Techdirt

from the that-was-that dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we saw a new breed of scammers start abusing the DMCA on YouTube, and a new evolution of copyright trolls abusing the DMCA to take down social media accounts and demanding money to reinstate them. We also saw the debate following the Harper’s letter reach new heights of absurdity with a call for strengthening copyright to fight cancel culture. We wrote about how piracy was saving lives in the pandemic, and about the nature of the rapidly fragmenting “splinternet”. The UK got on the bandwagon of blacklisting Huawei, while hysteria about TikTok in the US was getting stupider. And a judge, as expected, got rid of the prior restraint order preventing Mary Trump from publishing her book.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, a top RIAA executive was making some wild claims about the supposed need for stronger copyright in Africa and the Middle East, the Authors Guild wrote a ridiculous letter calling for new SOPA-like notice-and-staydown rules, Rightscorp was trying to defend its strategy of harassing people with phone calls, and the White House was agreeing to terrible things in an effort to push through the TPP. In the UK, the High Court doubled down on preventing people from ripping their own CDs, the controversial data retention law was thrown out a year after its passage, and a new silly educational campaign against piracy was launched. Also, in what would eventually evolve into a now-well-known and influential whitepaper, we published Mike’s call for moving to open protocols instead of closed platforms.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wondered why RIAA bosses were getting raises after all their high-profile failures, though perhaps it had something to do with the shifty tactics of RIAA accounting. We looked more closely at the constitutional analysis of the copyright awards in the Joel Tenenbaum case, while the Wall Street Journal wrote about the problems of “permission culture”. The ongoing problems with the ACTA negotiations were even turning off some copyright boosters, while EU negotiators were presenting to EU Parliament in secret, but all the efforts at secrecy of course couldn’t stop yet another leak of the text, which yet again revealed all sorts of serious problems.

Filed Under: history, look back