This Week In Techdirt History: November 2nd – 8th

from the so-it-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about why most complaints about Section 230 are really just complaints about the First Amendment, and another with a deep dive into the implications of the presidential election for various issues in tech. As the votes from said election poured in, we noted how social media was doing a better job than traditional media at fact-checking early victory claims. Also: a California Assemblywoman was celebrating being awarded an honorary gold record from the RIAA, the producers of Enola Holmes hit back hard at the Conan Doyle estate’s copyright claims, and the makers of anti-cheat software Proctorio were using the DMCA to censor critiques of its code.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, it was a sketchy food scanning company abusing the DMCA to censor critical reporting, while the think tank behind SOPA was calling for countries to block The Pirate Bay, and the MPAA was prematurely declaring another victory over piracy after whacking a few moles. In the UK, the government introduced its infamous “Snooper’ Charter” to mandate encryption backdoors, which would legalize over a decade of secret, illegal mass surveillance, and Home Secretary Theresa May soon faced some bluff-calling over her insistence that people shouldn’t worry about metadata.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the EFF sued the US government over its own demands for wiretap backdoors in communication tools. Music publishers were going after successful parodies on YouTube (while Turkey resumed blocking YouTube altogether), the Copyright Office was exploring the issue of pre-1972 sound recordings, Apple unilaterally told record labels that it was increasing iTunes song previews to 90 seconds, and we dug into the huge awards coming out of the never-ending series of Jammie Thomas trials. The UK’s National Rail was threatening the maker of a train time app, Brazilian librarians were standing up for the open access to knowledge, and the EU first began circulating its proposal for a right to be forgotten.

Filed Under: history, look back