This Week In Techdirt History: April 4th – 10th
from the back-in-the-day dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2016, broadband providers were either fighting against privacy protections or trying to charge a premium for them (not unlike their approach to uncapped bandwidth). Evidence continued to show that encryption and “going dark” were not the cause of recent terrorist attacks, but that didn’t stop Senators Burr and Feinstein from releasing an anti-encryption bill that was even more ridiculous than expected (while the White House aimed to punt on the question). But this was also the week that WhatsApp finished rolling out end-to-end encryption, and the week of the massive Panama Papers leak.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2011, the MPAA filed its expected lawsuit against Zediva, while an appeals court heard the Joel Tenenbaum case, and Congress had a hearing on file sharing that turned into everyone against the COICA censorship bill, but Senator Leahy was happy to completely ignore the first amendment concerns. We also saw some worrying assertions emerge about what constitutes infringement, like linking to legal videos by rightsholders, being liable for people finding infringing movies via your search engine, and even forwarding a single sentence from a mailing list.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2006, there was yet another fight over song pricing on iTunes, while movie studios were continuing to attempt digital distribution with all the convenience sucked out, and newspapers were simultaneously bragging and whining about how much traffic their websites got. The RIAA was continuing its tradition of drop out of school to be able to pay a settlement fee. Also: the latest attempt to create a law about violent video games was once again declared unconstitutional, Netflix disappointingly (and unnecessarily) tried to use business model patents against Blockbuster, and, after insisting it would never happen, Apple began officially endorsing the use of Windows on new Macs with Intel chips.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: April 4th – 10th”
Apple and Intel
Apple switching to intel was the final impetus for me to decide to actually get one, because that meant I could install Windows on it should I regret my decision. Now, under bumblefuck Tim Cook, they abandoned that smart decision (which is what Tim Cook routinely does) and goes even further to lock down macOS.
God, I hate Tim Cook. Steve Jobs had problems but he seemed to know what he was doing in a way that Tim Cook never did.
Forwarding a single sentence from a mailing list?
Now I’m starting to see why Jhon Smith has such a vested interest…