This Week In Techdirt History: October 12th – 18th

from the that-was-that dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, Ajit Pai put the final bullet in net neutrality and decided to move forward with unconstitutional rulemaking on Section 230, while Clarence Thomas joined the brigade of opposing 230, and Congress introduced yet another anti-230 bill, because sure why not? We looked at the pretty crummy results of the current Supreme Court term on issues we care about, and dedicated an episode of the podcast to what the TikTok order means for innovation. But surely the biggest story was when Facebook and Twitter tried to limit the spread of a sketchy NY Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, resulting in a huge mess of ridiculousness that led to Twitter adjusting its hacked document policy.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, the US, Canada and Australia decided to screw over poor nations in the TPP because Big Pharma wasn’t happy, while the USTR was fishing for academics to astroturf in favor of the agreement. James Comey claimed “dozens” of terrorists had evaded the FBI because of encryption, while the administration said it wouldn’t seek encryption backdoors, and Chuck Grassley was asking the DOJ to get back in the business of pushing for them. We also wrote about how bad copyright law makes us less safe, and filed a response to the White House’s request for comments on its intellectual property enforcement strategy.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wrote about how ACTA would turn private, non-commercial file sharing into criminal infringement, while the BSA was falsely claiming that ACTA was a treaty that had already been signed by 37 countries. We also looked at the rise of mass copyright infringement shakedown factories in the US, and quickly got an amusing demonstration when one such group sued another over trademark infringement, and started to notice how these groups were constantly copying each other. Meanwhile, an anti-piracy group in the Netherlands was caught planting evidence in a case against a Usenet provider.

Filed Under: history, look back