Tag Archive for: 20th

This Week In Techdirt History: October 20th – 26th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, scrutiny was ramping up on former NSA boss Keith Alexander from all directions, while evidence continued to emerge further linking the NSA’s SIGINT director to private contractors. Rep. Mike Rogers was calling for Ed Snowden to be charged with murder, and a former agency official was saying anyone who “justified” Snowden’s leaks shouldn’t be allowed to work for the government. We learned more about the CIA’s spying on the Senate, while Congress was not so easily giving in to the FBI’s demands about ending encryption, and amidst all this… more research showed mass surveillance doesn’t work.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, the copyright lobby was bumping up against proposed anti-spam laws because they might interfere with their DRM and spyware practices, copyright holders were going to war with univeristy photocopy shops, and the US Chamber of Commerce began its DMCA-fight with prank group The Yes Men. We learned that Shepard Fairey made some bad decisions in his copyright fight with the AP over his famous Obama poster, but also wondered whether anyone could trust the AP’s own reporting on the subject. And we saw trademark shenanigans from both the usual suspects (Monster Energy) and some more surprising ones (The Sex Pistols).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, people were looking to the future of mobile devices — especially with cheap wifi on the rise — and examining everything from what makes mobile bullying unique to the coming consequences of device convergence and the possibility of peer-to-peer bartering becoming a dominant form of commerce. One prediction certainly didn’t come true: a Finnish researcher extrapolated some trends and decided that the internet would collapse in 2006. Meanwhile, the RIAA’s own figures were painting a different picture about file sharing from the one the agency liked to tout, web publishers were maybe-kinda-sorta coming to terms with BugMeNot, and some news websites were getting over their silly aversion to linking to other news outlets in their own coverage.

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This Week In Techdirt History: July 14th – 20th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, new revelations from Edward Snowden painted a bad picture of the culture at the GCHQ while, in an interview, he also described the NSA practice of “routinely” passing around intercepted nude photos — something the agency quickly insisted it would stop if it knew about it. The NSA was also saying it had more emails from Snowden when he still worked for the agency, but would not release them.

Also this week in 2014: Google finally dumped its ill-fated real names policy, the MPAA was going after Popcorn Time, and the Supreme Court refused the Arthur Conan Doyle estate’s last-gasp attempt to stop Sherlock Holmes from becoming public domain.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, we saw the ninth misguided lawsuit over trademark in Google AdWords, the Guinness Book of World Records used a bogus takedown to try to hide the records of a very embarrassing website fail, New Zealand was considering copyright reform but not really anything meaningful, and the newly-hugely-popular So You Think You Can Dance was blocked from doing a Michael Jackson tribute. A Norwegian ISP was fighting back against the Pirate Bay ban, the National Portrait Gallery was threatening Wikimedia over downloading public domain images, and Stephen Fry stepped up as an ally against corporate copyright abuse.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the CEO of Streamcast was presenting evidence of collusion among record labels to blacklist file sharing companies, while a somewhat unclear study was suggesting BitTorrent usage was way up. The RIAA was predictably defending the INDUCE Act (which it basically wrote) in a letter full of misleading and untrue statements, while at the same time some people were asking if the agency’s new anti-filesharing system Audible Magic was in violation of wiretapping laws, and its counterpart in Canada was fighting against a court ruling that said ISPs don’t have to turn customer names over to the industry.

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This Week In Techdirt History: April 14th – 20th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, the world was dealing with the Heartbleed bug and turning its attention to the NSA’s possible awareness of it — leading Obama to tell them to start revealing flaws but with no particular incentive to actually do so. It wasn’t clear if the NSA had definitely known about and used Heartbleed, but there was nothing stopping them and people certainly weren’t going to take their advice on dealing with it. Overall, the simple truth was that the government pays to undermine, not fix internet security. Meanwhile, the Guardian and the Washington Post won Pulitzers for their coverage of the Snowden leaks, which made a lot of folks angry including Rep. Peter King and CIA torture authorizer John Yoo.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, the BSA was using the spate of stories about Somali pirates to talk about software piracy in a stunningly tonedeaf fashion, NBC was crafting its plans to make Olympic coverage worse and more expensive, the Associated Press was admitting its attack on aggregators looks stupid to the “untrained eye” while failing to explain why it shouldn’t look stupid to everyone else too, and a hilarious but frightening warrant application got a college student’s computer seized in part for using “a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on”. DMCA abuse was chugging along as usual, with an activist group using it to hide exposure of its astroturfing and a news station using it to cover up video of it embarrassingly falling for an April Fool’s story. And long before the Snowden revelations, not only were we already seeing revelations about the NSA’s abuse of power, we were already unsurprised.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the internet was still beginning to embrace some of the innovations that define it today: location-based services were on the rise, with Google launching localized ads and mobile phone navigation systems threatening to oust expensive dedicated hardware (something also happening in other areas like event ticket handling), and more and more people were going online wirelessly in one way or another. Of course, along with this was the rise of some more problematic trends too, like patent hoarding houses and DRM. In California, the first two arrests were made under a new law banning all kinds of video cameras in movie theaters, while one state senator was seeking to completely ban Gmail (which was still new) for some reason — though at least the legislature shot down another ban on violent video game sales to minors.

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This Week In Techdirt History: January 20th – 26th

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, Dianne Feinstein was defending the NSA on the basis that they are so “professional”, while ignoring declassified facts that contradicted some of her statements. Then the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board released an anticipated report that destroyed the arguments for bulk collections — and noted that the FISA court didn’t even bother evaluating the legality of such collections until after the Snowden leaks. TV news stations, meanwhile, seemed intent on giving NSA defenders all the air time in the world, and though NSA critics got a bit of time too, sometimes they had to cut away due to critical events beyond their control… like the latest Justin Bieber news.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, as usual, the recording industry was engaged in multiple battles. The RIAA was considering trying to bribe ISPs into playing along with its copyright strikes program, while its British equivalent was convincing the UK government to force them to do so, and a bunch of labels were launching the first infringement lawsuit directly targeting an ISP in Ireland. But the biggest fight was the developing Joel Tenenbaum case, where the RIAA was so opposed to it being streamed online that they appealed the judge’s order (supposedly out of fear that people might remix it to make them look bad, as if they needed any help with that) — and they even sought sanctions against Tenenbaum’s lawyer.

Fifteen Years Ago

The Tenenbaum case was in response to the RIAA’s mass lawsuit strategy, and the same week in 2004 was a prime example, with the agency suing 532 new John Does in the hopes of subpoenaing their information. Meanwhile, Kazaa was suing the industry in an audacious move of its own. Pepsi put a bunch of kids sued by the RIAA in a commercial for their limited time iTunes promotion, while Coca-Cola was struggling to keep its ill-fated music download service up and running (it was a weird time).

The photography industry was trying to drag on the quality of camera phones, thus missing the point which is that people can do new things with them, like the early discovery that they could be bar-code scanners. And, in an event that seems worth noting given today’s insane and chaotic news climate, this was around the time that dedicated “fact-checking” sites started popping up online.

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