This Week In Techdirt History: April 26th – May 2nd

Techdirt

from the temporal-distancing dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2015, we learned more about one of the NSA’s sweeping but useless surveillance programs, and about the stunning lack of oversight when the CIA wants to drone-strike people. But we weren’t learning more about the TPP, since it was secret, even though President Obama was demanding critics explain what was wrong with the agreement they weren’t allowed to see (just as a UN expert was saying that secret trade negotiations are a threat to human rights). Tom Friedman, meanwhile, was maybe going just a little overboard in advocating for the deal.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2010, the UK Labour Party was yet again caught apparently infringing on copyright with a campaign poster while also being the champions of the Digital Economy Bill and its draconian copyright rules. They claimed “innocent error” — a defense notably absent from their own law. In the US, a worrying bill was pushing to extend DMCA-style takedowns to “personal information”, while Twitter was taking down a lot of tweets over bogus DMCA claims, and an appeals court upheld a hugely problematic ruling about who counts as a journalist.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2005, Wal-Mart was making a hilariously late second-entry into the online music store market, while Disney was backing down from a video-on-demand offering that I suppose counts as a distant ancestor to Disney Plus. Nathan Myhrvold was mixing up innovation and invention with Intellectual Ventures, while the head of the Patent Office was floating some very bad ideas about reform, even as companies like Intel were getting vocal about the problem of patent trolls.