Tag Archive for: 10th

This Week In Techdirt History: October 4th – 10th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2015, the TPP negotiators pulled an all-nighter to finish the latest draft of the agreement, though of course it still remained secret. An announcement from New Zealand, however, confirmed that it would extend copyright terms and lock-in terrible anti-circumvention rules, leading us to reiterate that it’s not a “free trade” agreement but rather a protectionist one. Then, at the end of the week, Wikileaks released the final intellectual property chapter (and it was basically as bad as expected).

Ten Years Ago

Before the TPP, it was ACTA. This week in 2010, negotiators announced that ACTA was nearly complete and that the final text would be released by the end of the week — yet somehow (shocking!) the MPAA was able to announce that it was in favor of the current text it wasn’t supposed to have seen. Many in the EU Parliament were not at all happy about the agreement, and in Mexico the Senate actually voted unanimously to remove the country from negotiations. When the text was released on Wednesday, it had shed some of the worst aspects of earlier versions but was still full of problems, and for some reason the negotiators were still obsessing about secrecy in their briefings about the now-public text.

Also, just to hammer home how long this thing’s been going on, here’s a 2010 post about some of the early blows in the fight between Oracle and Google.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2005, the Grokster decision was just one factor in the messy fight over the criminality of writing software, the USPTO was busy producing anti-piracy propaganda, and DRM-makers were espousing the importance of DRM even though, as usual, numbers suggested that file sharing is good for sales. The recording industry was demanding too much in its negotiations with tech companies and setting its sites on satellite radio as its new target, not to mention trying out new arguments against fair use. But we saw one great ruling from Australia, where the Supreme Court found that mod-chipping consoles does not violate anti-circumvention laws.

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This Week In Techdirt History: November 10th – 16th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, the amicus briefs were rolling in on Google’s first attempt to get SCOTUS to hear the Oracle case. We were surprised when Obama called for real net neutrality, and not so surprised when the broadband industry and T-Mobile’s CEO and the rest of the anti-net-neutrality brigade freaked out in response. Meanwhile, Techdirt got dragged into the Roca Labs affair when Roca bizarrely sued Marc Randazza largely over a post we wrote, just before it began issuing bogus DMCA notices to Google over PissedConsumer reviews. This was also the week we launched the Techdirt podcast.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, a Danish anti-piracy group was withdrawing all its lawsuits against individuals after it lost most of them, though this just spurred the IFPI to say it would start seizing computers to get more evidence. The UK was moving towards forcing ISPs to retain user data and kicking people off the internet, while Rupert Murdoch was audaciously claiming that fair use could be struck down entirely by the courts, and we took a look at how a lot of Murdoch’s own websites contained aggregators just like the ones he was so angry about. Verizon started passing on RIAA letters to users, the MPAA got a town’s public wi-fi shut down over one single unauthorized movie download, and we looked closer at Bluebeat’s bizarre “psycho-acoustic simulation” copyright claim on Beatles songs.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, Monster Cable was establishing its reputation as a trademark monster, Blockbuster was making the questionable decision to buy more stores, and the entertainment industry just couldn’t quite give up on self-destructing DVDs. The deluge of video ads on the web was just beginning, though it probably wasn’t yet quite as annoying as AOL’s very stupid TV commercials. The notion of selling instead of going public was becoming mainstream for tech startups, and Google’s not-so-revolutionary IPO was not kickstarting the Dutch Auction trend many people expected. And lastly, this was the week Firefox officially hit version 1.0.

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This Week In Techdirt History: August 4th – 10th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, while President Obama was defending the CIA’s increasingly exposed use of torture on the basis that they had a “tough job”, James Clapper was defending the redactions in the torture report and calling them “minimal” — but Senators were calling it “incomprehensible”, because even 15% redaction can hide all the critical details.

Meanwhile, comic artist Randy Queen was giving a crash course in DMCA abuse, using takedowns to censor blogs that were critical of his work, then claiming that posts criticizing this were defamatory, then doubling down yet again by trying to DMCA the posts about his DMCA abuse.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, a Washington Post writer started an online journalism dust-up when he complained about Gawker “ripping off” his reporting with a blog post discussing and heavily linking to one of his articles. Other bloggers quickly pointed out that, in fact, the mainstream press “rips off” bloggers constantly, spurring more people to dig in and illustrate the entitlement mentality driving big media’s complaints about blogs, and finally the suggestion that perhaps they should run their own blogs about their own reporting if they are so upset. Amidst this, the Associated Press was still digging in on their plan to DRM the news, with their text licensing calculator that would gladly charge you for any text whether it came from the AP or not, and ironically leveraging Creative Commons licensing language for their ill-fated DRM tech. We suggested the agency would be better off finding other services to offer newspapers, while competitor Reuters stepped up defended linking, excerpting and sharing.

Also this week in 2009, we published a long rebuttal to the RIAA’s factually-challenged boasts about the Joel Tenenbaum verdict.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, long before Joel Tenenbaum, we were wondering why the RIAA gets to hold parents responsible for their kids’ downloading. The US was using trade negotiations to export the DMCA and software patents to Australia, as it likes to do, Hollywood succeeded in driving a DVD backup software company out of business, and for no particular reason the FCC happily voted that VoIP systems should be required to have wiretap backdoors for law enforcement — a fitting week for Tim Wu to write a post exploring how different regulatory schemes create a “copyright gap” that impacts the telephony and content industries in vastly different ways. We also got an important appeals court ruling that found websites devoted to criticizing companies are not commercial speech and thus do not constitute trademark infringement.

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