This Week In Techdirt History: October 15th – 21st

Techdirt

from the more-copyright dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, we saw more copyright nonsense as South Park was sued over a character design and textbook publisher Pearson managed to take down 15-million student and teacher blogs with a single DMCA notice — but of course, being punished for a bad DMCA notice was and is almost impossible. As we approached the 30-year anniversary of the CD, we lamented the lack of music industry innovation, while the numbers continued to show that file sharers are also big media buyers. And Harvey Weinstein made an appearance on Techdirt — over an unhinged rant about piracy.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007 things weren’t much different, though perhaps even sillier, with one law firm trying to use copyright to claim you can’t look at its website’s source code, a bunch of media companies claiming it’s infringement to skip commercials, Congress pushing for anti-P2P laws with claims that P2P promotes identity theft, and the RIAA launching its lawsuit against Usenet.com. Amidst all this, YouTube made a major announcement and ContentID was born.

Fifteen Years Ago

And guess what? More of the same this week in 2002 — but it was a week when more people were noticing the problems. Some were (rightly) worrying about the future of expanding DRM, and talking about copyright law as the new prohibition and a tool that lets corporations destroy America’s cultural heritage, and asking if we really want to put the dinosaurs in charge of evolution. Copyright defenders were hitting back weakly, with arguments amounting to “trust me” and “shut up, Gary Shapiro, we don’t like you”.

Filed Under: history, look back