This Week In Techdirt History: August 15th – 21st
from the stuff-that-happened dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2016, a wave of newspapers that had tried out paywall models were discovering they didn’t work as well as hoped, and those that had come to rely almost solely on Facebook for traffic were realizing that might have been a mistake. Snowden documents revealed that the NSA and New Zealand had been spying on pro-democracy activists, the DNC set up a Cybersecurity Board that was devoid of cybersecurity experts, and Donald Trump was promising to keep terrorists off the internet. Peter Thiel was taking a weird victory lap regarding Gawker, and we were disappointed to see LinkedIn abusing the CFAA and DMCA to sue scraping bots. Also, an episode of our podcast featured an early discussion of what would become a major theme for us over the past few years: the difference between platforms and protocols.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2011, some cops were trying to fight citizen recordings with wiretapping charges, and other cops were making excuses about why they can detain harmless photographers. Google spent a cool $12.5-billion to buy Motorola Mobility for all its patents, and we took a look at just what it was getting out of the deal and how it represented the loss to innovation caused by patents. We had a few other posts on the patent system too, looking at how they can be detrimental to the long-term success of startups, debunking the myth that they want or need them, and asking why monopolies for the first to invent something are really so important.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2006, Apple seemed to be on the warpath against any product with “pod” in the name, Jack Thompson was demanding early access to video games so he could get mad about them, and a mistake at Techdirt caused the deletion of a morning’s worth of comments. The RIAA oh-so-graciously gave a family 60 days to grieve before continuing its case against a dead man, but then backed down in the face of widespread coverage and backlash, while the recording industry was taking petty revenge on a musician who supported free music and the movie industry was using push polls to defend the theater industry. We also took a look at how the more Hollywood attacks file sharing, the further underground it goes.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: August 15th – 21st”
…unfortunately, they were 6 years too early to stop Tide Pods and the resulting, er, challenges, those created.
Re: Re:
Open the pod bay doors please, HAL.
This week in 2022
Techdirt presents "This week in 2017", "This week in 2012", "This week in 2007", "This week in 2002" and "This week in 1997". Hey, will techdirt have a great big 25th Anniversary celebration? I suggest a Mike prepares a magazine article length post about all the advances in technology and why he feels so positive about everything. I like those posts each year and I think we could all use a great big dose of positivity right about now(ish). Start working on it now so it’s ready on time, get Tim to bake a cake, decorate it with edibles and away we go!