This Week In Techdirt History: December 17th – 23rd

from the advent-calendar dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, the MPAA was claiming that millions of DMCA takedowns are proof that Google needs to magically stop piracy, while the RIAA was trying to rewrite the history of copyright, and the BPI was threatening to personally sue the leaders of the UK pirate party. But the intellectual property diplomats at the US State Department were moaning about how they can’t export strict copyright laws as easily as they’d like to, since for every country like the UK (where London police were setting up a special force of copyright cops), there was one like Australia (which was refusing to play Hollywood’s game). Then, of course, at the end of that same week, the administration’s shortlist for new ambassador appointments included a bunch of big Hollywood donors.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, it was sports organizations taking the lead in the copyright fight, realizing they could (ab)use it to try to stifle press coverage, and clamp down on those dastardly live-bloggers. The IFPI went after Alibaba for linking to downloadable music, while the Korean government was paying out $170 million to publishers to mollify them after copyright extensions hurt their businesses. Amidst all this, we were pointing out that “balance” in copyright is a myth and a red herring, and it’s time to get off of our unhealthy addiction to intellectual property.

Fifteen Years Ago

Not much different this week in 2002, with the RIAA amping up its extremely dubious claims with extremely dubious math and Hollywood fighting to ban DVD-copying software — while more and more people began to realize that copyright was enabling widespread censorship (not to mention undermining cybersecurity). But, there was a noteworthy light in the darkness! It was this week, about a year after the initial announcement, that Creative Commons was officially launched and began its ongoing project to change the way we think about copyright, content and sharing.

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Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: December 17th – 23rd”

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16 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

“How mightily convenient of you to close for a holiday that most of you don’t even celebrate without first writing even ONE paragraph about Eric Shmidt’s highly SUSPICIOUS and SUDDEN resignation…. gee whiz…. “what a surprise”…..”

Par for the course around here. If it has to do with something insidious at Google, they’re gonna do one thing or another to Spackle it over, and/or minimize the nature of it.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: If it has to do with something insidious at Google, they're gonna do one thing or another to Spackle it over ...

As you can see, still not one word about it, so you can shut your goddamn piehole. Btw, when TechDirt writes an article about Google doing things wrong, they do so like this…

GOOGLE HAS BEEN A BAD DOG.

Google has been a bad dog… however you must consider they are dealing with this and that and the other and when you look at it from that retarded vector, they are not really “that” bad of a dog, now are they? In fact, they are merely victim of circumstances….

“Presto” “Unbiased” “reporting” “from” “””TechDirt”””

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re: Re:

And? If Schmidt decides to sue women to muzzle their testimony like Harvey Weinstein did you might expect an article. Womanizing has nothing to do with surveillance, phishing, data farming, piracy, or the other topics Techdirt usually writes about.

If you want to celebrate the downfall of Google because one man was a pervert, good for you, lots of websites talk about it. This country is run by a self-declared womanizer. You see him sharing a cell with Bubba any time soon?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

“How mightily convenient of you to close for a holiday that most of you don’t even celebrate without first writing even ONE paragraph about Eric Shmidt’s highly SUSPICIOUS and SUDDEN resignation…. gee whiz…. “what a surprise”…..”

Par for the course around here. If it has to do with something insidious at Google, they’re gonna do one thing or another to Spackle it over, and/or minimize the nature of it.

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