Five Years Ago:

Bono thought that Chinese internet censorship was a good example of how the US should deal with music piracy. Viacom was in the thick of its lawsuit with YouTube, asking the court of summary judgment, but redacting nearly the entire argument because apparently the reasons were secret. Sony Pictures was refusing to send out some screener DVDs to promote its own films for the Oscars, because it was worried about piracy. A Finnish indie label claimed that it wouldn't sign any new bands unless the government magically stopped piracy. After that got some attention the company deleted that statement, and appears to still be releasing music. An analysis of the impact of the leak of the Wolverine film suggested that the leak may have actually helped at the box office. We were, once again, pointing out how there's basically no punishment for filing bogus DMCA claims -- and this was in the days before millions were sent every few days.

France was looking to put in place a right to forget law, while also floating an idea to just tax internet companies to fund record labels. France really, really hates the internet, huh? Meanwhile there was a good proposal in the UK to require copyright holders to have to demonstrate actual damages from infringement (unfortunately, that didn't go anywhere). UFC announced that it was going to sue individual downloaders even though the company knew that the cost of suing was more than any "loss." Speaking of copyright infringement, we wondered how some people could argue that inline linking was infringement, seeing as it's little different than deeplinking, which is legal. Of course, this fight lives on today over embedding. Meanwhile, in Singapore, remote DVRs were declared infringing, the opposite of the Cablevision case in the US.

Some guy sued his neighbors for refusing to turn off their WiFi. The FCC's very first attempt at net neutrality rules weren't faring well in court (just like the second ones, though hopefully they get it right the third time). We were rightly predicting that there was a coming fight between cable TV and the internet. Chris Dixon wrote a great piece talking about how the next big thing will start out looking like a toy -- something that I often still reference today. We discussed how, for all the promise of the Obama administration being the first "internet" Presidential administration, the reality was that once elected, the administration basically gave up on the public that helped it get elected. Cisco was realizing that patenting everything was a waste of time.

We were pointing out how more surveillance makes us less safe (yes, years before Snowden). We were concerned about the TSA sending subpoenas to some bloggers who wrote about some TSA directives.

Ten Years Ago:

As you may have heard, ten years ago I uttered the phrase "the Streisand Effect" for the first time, and that may be the most popular thing I've ever done. Yet another court told the RIAA that it can't subpoena info on downloaders without first filing a lawsuit (something some copyright trolls still don't believe). In response, the BSA asked Congress to change the law to force ISPs to hand over info (thankfully, that didn't happen). Someone conducted a whole study to point out that the entertainment industry was worried about file sharing.

Bill Gates argued that people trying to reform copyright laws to make them less draconian were just Communists, because, apparently, he understands neither the economics of intellectual property, nor Communism. An appeals court panel ruled that ESPN could, in fact, call Evel Knievel a "pimp" (in response, Knievel called the judges "bimbos."). We were already pointing out problems with red light cameras. A law professor "with three doctorates" fell for a Nigerian scam.

Fifteen Years Ago:

This was the week that AOL announced it was buying Time Warner, and the entire internet landscape shifted. But not necessarily in a good way (though I still argue the idea was sound, the execution was dreadful). Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs also dropped the "interim" part of his "interim CEO" title that he'd taken upon his return to Apple. With the failure of any doom and gloom scenarios post Y2K, some were angry at those who predicted the end of the world. Meanwhile, the SF Chronicle was predicting what would happen if tech stocks crashed (which they did 3 months later).

There was some discussion about the idea of using GPS to automatically slow down cars that were speeding (bad idea). I was excited about MP3 watches at CES (I even had one for a few years, and it was great).

One Hundred And Twenty One Years Ago:

A 47-frame film of Fred Ott sneezing, created by WK Dickson (working for Thomas Edison), was filmed and given a copyright, making it "the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture" thus kicking off the movie industry's over-infatuation with copyright that lives on to this day.

Five Years Ago:

Movie studios started planning how to stop Netflix from showing their films (which is why Netflix still has a limited selection of streaming movies). This was also the week that Viacom realized that of all the videos it had sued YouTube over, it had actually uploaded over 100 of them itself -- meaning both that they were fully licensed and proving the point that if Viacom can't even tell which videos are licensed and which are not, it's ridiculous to think that YouTube should just magically know which ones are which. Record label Interscope was trying to get people to buy CDs by offering you a copy of Tweetdeck software "for free!" if you bought a CD. Except, of course, Tweetdeck has always been free. The MPAA ratings people gave "It's Complicated" an R rating for showing movie watchers that pot can make you giggle. Nina Paley made a key point in noting that the problem has never been middlemen, but monopolies.

One court totally overreacted and ordered an entire website taken down because of some defamatory comments on them, while another court correctly rejected a lawsuit against a consumer complaint site (ConsumerAffairs) properly noting that Section 230 protected the site from liability over actions of its users. Meanwhile, the Canadian government sought to take down a parody site by the Yes Men, and it resulted in the ISP actually taking down 4,500 sites. Censorship at its finest.

We wrote about how automakers were abusing copyright law to force you to pay more for repairs. FCC boss Julius Genachowski's Facebook account spammed all his friends with a "make money now!" offer. And a court tossed out a silly class action lawsuit against Apple from people who said the iPod resulted in hearing loss.

Finally, we're only looking back five years here, but five years ago we wrote about how the blog MusicAlly was looking back at the major labels' "online strategies" from 2001. They weren't pretty, though the strategies were fairly amusing -- mostly focusing on proprietary formats and DRM. As we noted at the time, all of the strategies were focused on trying to recreate the old retail world where scarcity ruled. That's a really dumb strategy in an age of digital abundance.

Ten Years Ago:

It was (not surprisingly) a bit of a slow week. Minnesota kept trying to tax VoIP companies despite FCC rules saying that VoIP shouldn't be taxed like regular phone lines. Verizon's anti-spam system went haywire and just started blocking all foreign emails (that's one strategy...). Some music labels were apparently experimenting with sneaking spyware into media files (a bit of foreshadowing for the Sony rootkit scandal, which went public the following year).

We were also talking about early ride sharing programs, whether or not the internet was good or bad for social relationships, and musicians who realized it was good to give fans what they want. Oh yeah, we also discussed how you couldn't name your kid with a .com in his name in China.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Our final post of 1999 pointed out that the Y2K bug scare didn't actually result in that much business. Some had been predicting that "fixing" the Y2K bug would be a boost to some tech companies' bottom lines. Wired Magazine, which had bizarrely sold off its entire digital arm, including the wired.com domain name was trying to buy it back -- a deal that wouldn't actually be completed until 2006. ABC was getting (rightfully so) nervous about dot com bubble startups buying Superbowl Ads, asking those companies to pay cash up front. And just to show you how different things were in 1999, people were excited about the fact that DVDs were catching on, after some had expressed skepticism that they'd find a real market. Things have changed....

Thirty One Years Ago

AT&T was broken up as a monopoly by the US government. And, today, it's almost all the way back to a monopoly. Watch that pendulum swing...

Five Years Ago

A federal Anti-SLAPP law was introduced in Congress, and went nowhere. It's something we desperately need, and it's ridiculous that Congress hasn't taken up the issue. Various online publications were still whining about Google sending them traffic. Meanwhile, as the recording industry was whining about piracy, we noted that it would likely be blaming something else within a decade (I think streaming sites are the current obsession). IsoHunt lost a key ruling in court, saying that the site "induced" infringement by showing what was popular -- and also because the court took some statements by the site's founder out of context.

China took unending Hollywood-funded pressure to ramp up its efforts to stop copyright infringement... and used it as an excuse to censor more of the stuff on the internet that the Chinese government didn't like. Meanwhile, a German court decided that TV schedule information was covered by copyright. Demi Moore's lawyers thought that it was defamation to suggest that her images had been photoshopped. And the NBA was fining players for happily tweeting about victories too soon after the game was done.

There are two other interesting stories, just because nearly identical issues have cropped up this week, five years later. First, we had a discussion on whether or not sites should be forced to take down content if a court rules against the user -- if the user can't be found or is unable to do anything about the content. The sites are protected by Section 230 and don't need to do anything -- but some are suggesting otherwise. In fact, a judge in NY was suggesting that a Right To Be Forgotten might be a good remedy in this situation. The second was a story out of Chicago, done by the Chicago Tribune, noting that red light cameras seemed to be leading to more accidents. We've been reporting on this exact thing for many, many years, but this past week the very same Chicago Tribune reported on the very same issue again after doing a more detailed look at the numbers. Turns out its story from five years ago still held true: red light cameras increase crashes.

Ten Years Ago:

Do you remember when Cablevision thought that it was going to get into the satellite TV game and compete with DirecTV and Dish? It was called Voom and it failed miserably. Blockbuster (remember that company?) was realizing that Netflix was real competition. During this holiday season -- but years before smartphones were really a thing -- we were discussing the issue of bringing your email on vacation.

Despite all the fears about kids learning "texting speak," studies were showing that kids can understand the context and know they have to write differently in formal settings rather than sending a text to a friend. And yet some people still don't believe this. Trust me: kids are smarter than you think. Finally, we were learning about more and more documentaries that could never be shown again, because original licenses for archival footage and/or music wouldn't allow them to ever be shown again.

Fifteen Years Ago:

While most people were correctly predicting that the shift from 1999 to 2000 would not result in the Y2K bug ending the world, MTV was still pulling a publicity stunt and sending six people into a bunker to repopulate the world after everything fell apart. I wonder if they're still down there. Speaking of bad predictions, some were saying that Amazon.com was finished. In 1999. Oops. But, more seriously, online shopping was having some trouble delivering Christmas gifts on time.

Fifteen years ago, there were some early attempts to monitor driving traffic by looking at mobile phone data. The idea seemed perplexing to us -- and we wondered about the privacy implications. Of course, fifteen years later, we're all tracked everywhere we go... but we have pretty decent information about the traffic when we're driving. Finally, in those early days on the web, you could still put up fake job listings and convince people they were interviewing for a job at CBS.

Thirty Two Years Ago

Time Magazine named "the personal computer" as its "Person of the Year" -- the first time it went to a non person.

Five Years Ago:

ESPN suspended Bill Simmons (from Twitter) for calling someone deceitful. Huh. That sounds familiar. ACS:Law, which was the UK version of Prenda before Prenda existed was just ramping up. Spam King Alan Ralsky was sent to jail. Microsoft was trying to shut someone up after they revealed some "flaws" in Microsoft's plan to bribe users to use Bing instead of Google. Speaking of Bing, Rupert Murdoch was toying with the idea of taking News Corp. sites out of Google's search results if Microsoft paid him enough. And Hulu was furious that people were actually embedding its videos, despite the fact that Hulu provided tools to embed.

We looked at how Hollywood was really at fault for a significant part of movie piracy, by not giving users what they wanted. Similarly, we looked at how the recording industry spent so much on payola to get people to hear their music for free -- and yet were so angry about piracy, which got people to hear their music for free. Speaking of Hollywood, the heads of the big studios had pretty much all settled on a new talking point: that they were really concerned about the independent filmmaker, rather than big studios when ti came to piracy. Of course, more indie films were being made than ever before, and those indie filmmakers now have many more ways to get supported than ever before, so that rang pretty hollow. And, a record label exec was arrested for not using Twitter to ask Justin Bieber fans to disperse.

We were celebrating Wil Wheaton saying people should "get excited and make things" rather than griping about how business models and such were changing online. Meanwhile, we highlighted some research about how copying and imitation are actually quite good for society, even if people think they're bad.

Ten Years Ago:

We were talking about how there were over 400 companies selling "VoIP" offerings, and wondering how they could possibly survive (spoilers: they didn't). The first case we'd heard of where scammers were trying to sneak malware through banner ads on popular sites. Unfortunately, this remains an issue today. People were starting to realize that stores like Best Buy were really showrooms for Amazon. And a court told the MPAA that it couldn't lump a bunch of unrelated file sharing lawsuits into the same case.

Also, ten years ago, Perfect 10 sued Google for showing thumbnails of some of its porn images hosted on other sites. That case would result in one of Perfect 10's many courtroom losses, and also set a good precedent concerning fair use. Also, ten years ago Congress started pushing for a new job in the White House, the IP Enforcement Coordinator -- a role they finally pushed through as part of the ProIP Act in 2008 (with the job coming into existence in 2009).

Fifteen Years Ago:

Ah, such a quaint time. We were excited about the possibility of paying bills online (seriously). This was the era of the "free ISP," though the catch was that if you used them, you had to deal with ads from them. So we found it interesting that a new one was launching, and its main selling point was that it was a free ISP with no ads. Instead, they hoped you'd buy stuff from their e-commerce store. Media merger potential is always in the news, so fifteen years ago, Time Warner as looking to buy NBC. Oh, and remember when AOL was so powerful that it could be evil without consequence? In order to ramp up its business of spamming its own users, AOL claimed that all of the opt-outs from spam had "expired" and users had to re-opt-out to avoid being spammed by AOL partners in the future. How nice. No wonder people started leaving in droves soon after.

Forty two years ago:

Atari released Pong, the first "commercially successful video game" kicking off the start of the video game revolution. Two years ago, on the 40th anniversary, Buzzfeed published an astoundingly wonderful history of Atari and Pong. Go read it.

The CIA and Senate have found more to fight about. With the "Torture Report" mostly in the hands of the White House at this point, the two are now battling over the CIA's planned alterations to its email retention policies.

Key senators are pushing back against a CIA plan to destroy older emails of “non-senior” agency officials.

The heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday sent a letter opposing the proposal, under which only the highest ranking CIA workers would have their email correspondence permanently saved.

The plan “could allow the destruction of crucial documentary evidence regarding the CIA’s activities that is essential for Congress, the public and the courts to know,” Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) wrote to the National Archives...

The senators are asking the National Archives to step up and somehow prevent this from happening -- most likely by declaring "non-senior" emails to be retainable records that must be turned over rather than destroyed. The CIA would prefer to destroy the emails of all but the top 22 employees three years after they leave, or when "no longer needed, whichever is sooner." Unfortunately for the senators making this request, the National Archive has already signaled its agreement with the CIA's proposed retention schedule changes.

In tentatively approving the request, the National Archives noted that the emailed information “is unlikely” to exist in other forms that will be marked for permanent storage.

Any information not found in those other files likely “has little or no research value,” it added.

Senators Feinstein and Chambliss -- in rare agreement with transparency and government accountability activists -- disagree with the National Archives' assessment.

“In our experience, email messages are essential to finding CIA records that may not exist in other so-called permanent records at the CIA,” Feinstein and Chambliss wrote.

Longer retention is needed, especially for an agency as secretive as the CIA. The standard wait period for sensitive document declassification is 25 years. Correspondence related to declassified documents will be long gone by that point.

Even in terms of normal FOIA requests, three years is cutting things close. Rarely does an FOIA-worthy event come to light within days or weeks of its occurrence. It's generally weeks, months or years down the road. By the time documents are requested, ignored by the CIA's FOIA staff and finally pried free by a federal lawsuit*, responsive documents may already have been destroyed. Without a doubt, the CIA knows this is a distinct possibility and any trimming of retention periods only makes it more likely that relevant communications will be permanently removed from circulation.

*YMMV

There may be some better news on the way for those of us who like free-as-in-FOIA information and an accountable government. Professor and attorney Douglas Cox points out that an amendment to the statutes governing the National Archive may give that agency the power to keep records of public interest from being deleted, destroyed or otherwise hidden.

Having passed every step but presidential approval, H.R. 1233 (Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014) [pdf link], makes the following small, but important, change to the Archivist's powers and duties. Here's the portion Cox highlights at Document Exploitation:

DETERMINATION OF DEFINITION.—The Archivist’s determination whether recorded information, regardless of whether it exists in physical, digital, or electronic form, is a record as defined in subsection (a) shall be binding on all Federal agencies.

As Cox explains, this single paragraph allows the Archivist to determine what is or isn't a record -- something that must be retained -- and makes it binding across all federal agencies. If that passes, government agencies will no longer be able to exploit the law to bury embarrassing or incriminating documents.

[T]his authority allows the Archivist to close up - or at least tighten up considerably - the horrible loophole in the law that has been manipulated in a long line of cases of government document destruction or alienation.

Cox goes on to note that this isn't a theoretical harm. It's something that has happened time and time again over the past several years.

[F]rom the State Department's indefensible decision to allow Henry Kissinger to remove (and treat as his personal property) the transcripts of his official telephone calls as the Secretary of State all the way up to the CIA's destruction of the interrogation tapes. This is the same loophole that could legitimately endanger the long-term survival of the CIA's "Panetta Review" and necessitated the actions of the SSCI staff in exfiltrating a copy from the CIA to a Senate vault (as I described at length here - it is not a conspiracy theory), which is further complicated now by fears that new leadership at the SSCI will return the Panetta Review to the exclusive custody of the CIA.

The loophole isn't in the "record" language. That's still very broadly defined and (unfortunately) rather malleable. The loophole is which records are "appropriate for preservation," something that has been left up to each agency to determine. And "determine" they did, right up to the point that DC circuit court judges pointed out that government agencies have a "built-in incentive" to destroy records related to "mistakes."

Cox notes that while this amendment is promising, it doesn't fix everything -- especially some records-related circular reasoning that has made its way into the definition of "records" with the assistance of the National Archives and Records Association itself. But it is a step forward.

To be clear, the Archivist neither has the funding, nor the personnel, nor the appetite to look over the shoulder of every federal employee to micromanage whether each email is, or is not, a record, but this bill, once signed by the President, will give the Archivist an important power that should not be left to rot on the vine.

Cox recommends the first action it should take with its new powers (should the President sign it into law) is ensure the Panetta Review is designated a permanent federal record to keep the CIA from performing any extra "editing."

Five Years Ago

We were looking at what it would take to really reform copyright law thanks to a great paper from Jessica Litman. Meanwhile, one of our readers argued that there was actually a moral argument in favor of file sharing (I found it interesting, but didn't fully agree). Speaking of sharing, the White House was trying to claim that you couldn't modify its official photos, but that's not what copyright law says, since federal government works are public domain. In more bizarre government copyrighting, we discovered that Canada and Europe actually claim a copyright on the design of their currency. A court found that answers to textbook questions were a derivative work of the original, and thus potentially infringing.

The MPAA got some propaganda on 60 Minutes while we were wondering if any of this anti-piracy activity would actually make people buy. The MPAA was also claiming that if piracy wasn't stopped, the internet would die. And, of course, the FCC was looking at letting the MPAA break your TV and DVR because piracy. I was personally annoyed at Hulu for telling me I couldn't watch if I used my VPN.

In other news, Glenn Beck was not allowed to seize the domain name GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com, despite his attempts. Venezuela was blaming video games for violence. A court said that using a domain registration privacy service was "material falsification and David Brooks claimed that mobile phones were destroying courtship (I wonder what he thinks of Tinder).

Comcast was sure that the solution to customer complaints was to change customers' behavior, rather than its own business model. Retailers wanted a law blaming eBay for shoplifters selling stolen goods. Germany was already looking for blame Google copyright laws to "save newspapers." Oh, and the Obama administration broke out its first attempt to use a "state secrets" claim to kill a lawsuit about warrantless wiretapping.

And finally, we posted some results on our first experiment with asking you, our community, to support us.

Ten Years Ago

Time shifting TV was just catching on while voicemail was dying. Also, AOL was losing customers by the millions, which was funny for those of us who remembered its frequent press releases about each new million signups. Qualcomm spent nearly a billion dollars on a special TV system for mobile phones that absolutely no one wanted. Meanwhile a price war was breaking out in the DVD-by-mail space (remember that?). Oh and the broadband guys were already doing everything possible to block muni broadband competition.

We were wondering if virus writers deserved jailtime while some spammers were getting many years in jail. Meanwhile the feds were trying to track down the fax.com spammers who had been fined many times and just ignored it over and over again.

Bad patents were a big thing, with some company claiming a patent on international e-commerce and another on product recommendations. It was also one of the first times we'd seen a lawsuit over a negative review (and companies still don't seem to realize you can't really sue over that). Oh, and of course, the MPAA was copying the RIAA's bad strategy of suing file sharers.

Fifteen Years Ago

A court ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly while Webvan -- one of the classic dot com bubble startups -- had its IPO right at the height of the bubble era, just as competitor, HomeGrocer raised $100 million. Another classic of the bubble era was the online pet store category. While Pets.com was the most famous there were half a dozen or so competitors. One of them, Petopia, raised $66 million before launching and claimed its "differentiating factor" was it had more money than everyone else. And then, fifteen years ago this week two other online pet stores raised much more money, each breaking $100 million for unproven businesses in a highly competitive market. Think about that when people claim we're in a bubble today. Over in Europe, some folks were trying to copy Silicon Valley's bubble with the infamous boo.com -- and it wasn't going well (for the investors, at least).

Back in 1999, Microsoft was already looking at ebooks while Barnes & Noble bought books.com, which had been an attempt to take on Amazon by Cendant (which, at one time, had been considered an up-and-coming internet company) as well as a big stake in a publishing on demand company.

Fifteen years ago was also the week when we got one of the first absolute nutty web-meme/internet celebrities with the rise of Mahir, the "I Kiss You!!!" guy. His original web page has been moved, but you can see it here, and for you young kids who missed the Mahir phenomenon, you may immediately notice the resemblance to the later Sascha Baron Cohen character Borat -- something that apparently angered Mahir.

Twenty Six Years Ago:

The infamous Morris worm was unleashed on the internet, by Robert Morris -- who was just trying to measure the internet. Instead, it ended up taking down much of the internet, and Morris has the unfortunate claim to fame of being the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This represented the first of many abuses of the CFAA law, which still is in desperate need of fixing, and which Congress still refuses to fix. On a somewhat related note, years later, Morris went on to cofound YCombinator. Also, in the very first YCombinator class, one of the entrepreneurs was Aaron Swartz, who (as you well know) went on to kill himself while facing criminal charges under the CFAA for downloading too many journal articles from a website he had legal access to. Today would have been Aaron Swartz's 28th birthday (yes, he was born two years to the day before the Morris worm), and there are a bunch of hackathons in his honor going on.

Five Years Ago

It seems like there were a lot of shifting opinions this week in 2009. Media analysts began to realize that charging for online news was almost surely a losing proposition; Gartner was finally realizing that social networking at work isn't so bad; despite an anti-piracy "education" campaign, people in Sweden were becoming less and less concerned about file sharing — and, indeed, talk about the "death of file sharing" at the time was clearly exaggerated, while several musicians were beginning to realize that it's not as evil as they thought. And Europeans were being a bit confusing, supporting the idea of digitizing books as long as Google wasn't the one in charge.

Of course, we also saw plenty of the usual: Monster Energy Drink started bullying a beverage review website and a harmless actor. The Sex Pistols were also getting in on the trademark game. Hollywood was trying to contractually stop stars from connecting with fans, copyright holders were targeting university copy shops, PRS went after a shop assistant for singing at work, and the Wall Street Journal's managing editor called those of us who believe in free content neanderthals.

We were also in the middle of the Shepard Fairey/Associated Press dust-up, with Fairey foolishly destroying evidence and sacrificing good will — though we also wondered whether you could really trust the AP's coverage of the lawsuit.

Ten Years Ago

Remember that time in 2006 when the internet collapsed under its own weight and died an ignominious death? No? Well, in 2004, that's what one researcher was predicting. Not all the predictions ten years ago were bad though: people were cluing in to the future of device convergence and the need to ease up on brand management (I don't think Monster Energy got that message).

In the world of television, there were a few things going on. Work began on getting mobile HDTV ready to launch even though nobody seemed interested in mobile TV at standard definition; there was lots of chatter about devices that let you shut down any TV nearby by cycling through remote control codes; HBO was locking down the ability to copy programs, with flagrant disregard for fair use; and one man's TV caused a bizarre stir by broadcasting an international distress signal for some reason.

Today, it's almost impossible to imagine Christmas shopping without the internet — but in 2004, people were still wondering whether e-commerce could thrive without extreme holiday promotions. Publishers, meanwhile, were still worried about BugMeNot, and lots of people were worried about cyberbullying. One European Commission lawyer was not even a little bit worried about using his fax machine properly, and that cost 100 million euros when he put a document in upside-down and sent the court 100 blank pages.

Fifteen Years Ago

It's a shame that so many links from 1999 are now broken. Fifteen years ago, we pointed to an article by Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web — but sadly, the link now just puts you on the MSNBC home page. I haven't been able to track down the exact article, but I suspect it was related to his book Weaving The Web, released the same year.

Two years ago, Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped publishing in print — but back in 1999 it had just launched its website, only to see it knocked out by high traffic. Technical difficulties also plagued the online chess match between Kasparov and the world.

Amazon's one-click purchase patent is among the most infamous "bad web patents", and this week in 1999 the company sued Barnes & Noble over it. A less high-profile web battle also broke out, with funeral directors fighting against online casket sellers. And a bunch of software companies discovered that nobody cared about their No Piracy Day.

Today it's assumed that basically everyone has a working knowledge of the internet — but in 1999, companies were just realizing that "internet experience" is an important qualification for a CEO. A lot of companies were also planning millennium parties, since they wanted their employees around in case Y2K really turned out to be a disaster. And the state of Massachusetts was trying to brand itself the ".commonwealth" to compete with Silicon Valley.

1999 was a post-Playstation world, and a new big console war was brewing. At the time, the X-Box was a "mysterious" tease, the GameCube was still codenamed "Dolphin", the PS2 was gearing up for release in Japan, and the Sega Dreamcast was still considered a serious contender.

153 Years Ago

October 21st, 1861 was a landmark day in the history of telecommunication: the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed, connecting the small existing networks on the east and west coasts, and ushering out the Pony Express (which shut down two days later). The overland line would play a major role in America for the next eight years before being replaced by a new set of lines running along the Transcontinental Railroad route.

Five Years Ago:

We were still wondering about the attempts to insert the morality question into copyright, noting that it is almost always used to "cover up the inability to justify the expansion of rights on economic grounds." In a somewhat related post, we wondered what kind of industry sets up a group to specifically oppose what consumers want -- and the answer was: Hollywood. Another such group is the BSA, and it was finally having some of its nastier practices revealed. Sticking to the copyright question, we wondered if libraries really needed licenses to lend out ebooks, since they don't need permission to lend out regular books. ASCAP had a judge disabuse it of the notion that a ringtone is a public performance while a guy who uploaded his own book to Google and clicked the wrong button (making it available) then sued Google for infringement.

The Associated Press and News Corp. were demanding money from Google (of course) along with other "aggregators" though, News Corp. apparently forgot it had its own aggregators who didn't appear to pay up any money at all. Oops. NY's Department of Labor reduced the unemployment benefits of an unemployed blogger because he put AdSense on his blog (making around $1/day), claiming that it was unrevealed employment.

This was back in the day when people were still insisting that YouTube could never be profitable, but at least things like UK's Channel 4 were agreeing to put full shows on the site. In a surprise move, EMI actually did a licensing deal with Grooveshark, which (of course) later went away. A bunch of new music streaming services were hitting the market, and we didn't expect much from Mog or Rdio. Rdio's still around, but Mog got bought by Beats which got bought by Apple.

Indian officials wanted to block Skype while Finland was declaring broadband a human right. We also had our first post about the ridiculous Jenzabar case in which a former Tiananmen Square activist turned entrepreneur was abusing trademark law to stifle a documentary that made her look bad. Finally, five years ago, we disagreed with something Larry Lessig wrote -- which doesn't happen all that often around here.

Ten Years Ago:

John Ashcroft's Justice Department was eager to be Hollywood's private police force. But, in an important decision, the Supreme Court decided not to review an important ruling that said the RIAA couldn't demand names from ISPs without first filing a lawsuit (copyright trolls keep "rediscovering" this supposed "loophole" without checking out the case law on it). Starbucks thought it was going to get into the music business while Amazon thought it was going to rent DVDs (a la Netflix). Google also released its desktop search offering, which never took off.

Remember the OQO modular computer system? Probably not. It was insanely hyped varporware that people were talking about for years, but then it finally came out ten years ago and was overpriced and not very impressive. Applied Digital, a company famous for overstating claims about its "implantable" VeriChip was up to its usual games. Diebold e-voting machines had their usual problems. The FCC was in the process of killing off line sharing and people were realizing that all the doom and gloom predictions about how the phone "do not call" list would kill the economy were not even close to true.

Fifteen Years Ago:

We were getting close to Y2K and suggesting that it wasn't going to be a big deal (we were right on that one!). Bertelsmann and Xerox started experimenting with an early print on demand books offering, while we were excited that e-paper was finally coming.

On the patent front, noted patent maximalist Priceline was suing Microsoft for patent infringement, while Visa had to settle a lawsuit with a woman who gambled away $70,000 online and blamed Visas for not stopping her. While it obviously didn't apply to that woman, studies were showing that people were still afraid to use credit cards online.

Oh yeah. Also, 15 years ago this week, we wrote a short post about how people kept stealing other people's AOL passwords to break into their accounts. The story itself isn't noteworthy. But for the next fifteen years -- yes, right up until now -- idiotic people doing searches on "how to steal AOL passwords" somehow ended up on that page and would post details of the accounts whose passwords they wanted.

Twenty Years Ago:

We weren't yet publishing, but the first Netscape Navigator was released, sparking part of the revolution that led us to start Techdirt just a few years later. I still remember when Netscape came out. I had been a loyal user of the Mosaic browser, and so I rushed to download Netscape. But, since I had a pokey 2400 baud dialup modem in my dorm room at college, I had to make sure my roommate was okay with me leaving the phone line tied up all night to download the "massive" Netscape file (which I think was a massive 4 megs). If I remember correctly, the phone hung up in the middle of the first night and I had to wait until the next night to get the whole file down.

Five Years Ago

This week in 2009, we were awaiting the shutdown of Geocities, and contemplating what it could teach us about the future of the web. We were similarly contemplating the implications of the FTC's new disclosure rules.

The always-aggressive IOC was trying to block Olympia, Washington's Olympian newspaper from trademarking its name and threatening Flickr users for posting photos from the Beijing Games. Apple started a trademark fight with Woolworths over a barely-similar logo halfway around the world. CBS was, confusingly, trying to take down clips of David Letterman's recent and infamous on-air confession. Ralph Lauren was discovering the Streisand Effect following a Bad Photoshop Scandal. And Steve Ballmer, bafflingly, declared that "free is not a business model!"

Finally, five years ago this week, we wrote a fairly short post about the FBI going way overboard in their investigation of a programmer. At the time, we had no idea that Aaron Swartz's story would continue, nor did we know how tragically it would end. We didn't even use his known-in-some-circles-but-not-yet-famous name in the headline — an odd thing to see now. It's moments of contrast and reflection like this, I think, that are the true value of these Techdirt History posts, and I hope you all agree.

Ten Years Ago

Last week, we noted that SpaceShipOne had completed its first of two flights. This week, it completed the second and officially won the X-Prize. For the rest of the world, this week was a mix of tech-optimism and tech-panic.

Okay... mostly panic. Wardrivers were on the loose! The internet was causing sex obsession! Video games were terribly addictive! People were misdiagnosing themselves online and becomng cyberchondriacs! (Actually, that last one was and still is pretty accurate, I suppose.)

But there was a bit of optimism: a study suggested that texting brings families closer.

This week in 2004 is also when Google launched (or re-launched) Book Search, planting the seeds of a legal controversy that rages to this day. We've also got yet another quote from Steve Ballmer, this time as part of Microsoft's (futile) efforts to create a new DRM. Ballmer trashed Apple, saying "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'." Of course, another reporter suggested the whole thing might not have been as ridiculous as it sounded.

Fifteen Years Ago

Survivor is in its 29th series, with the 30th set to start in 2015. But this week in 1999 it hadn't even begun — its May 2000 launch was being aggressively promoted, and even Techdirt couldn't resist commenting on the idea. But hey, this is back when Silicon Valley was weird, and some executives believed technology came from aliens, or something like that.

In 2004 we had videogame addiction, but in 1999 we had an early stab at the simpler web addiction. But this was a time when net hype tended to win out — and a time when geography still mattered for this kind of thing, which is why that net hype was just spreading to the UK. Wal-Mart's much-hyped website was delayed, Amazon had just added a gift registry, and UPS was offering free internet access... but only to the UPS website.

Oh, and long before PRISM, there was Echelon. Remember Echelon? This week in 1999, some folks were trying to figure out how to gag it.

One-Hundred And Forty-Six Years Ago

Long-time fans of the site surely know that Mike Masnick's alma mater is Cornell University. Well, this week in 1868 marks its inauguration and subsequent enrollment of 412 students, the highest of any American university up to that time.