This Week In Techdirt History: December 28th – January 3rd

from the new-year(s) dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020-2021, we published a series of posts on Trump’s Presidential Commission On Law Enforcement, starting with a look at its tone that everyone but cops are to blame for the terrible state of policing, followed by its repeated calls for anti-encryption legislation, and its conclusion that doing the same things that haven’t worked for years will reduce violent crime. Meanwhile, a coalition of internet companies outside the realm of “big tech” raised their voices about the importance of Section 230, just as Oracle was gleefully taking credit for attacks on 230 and on Google, and we wrote about the perennial myth that Section 230 is some kind of “subsidy” for tech companies.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015-2016, Mark Zuckerberg was trying to spin opposition to Facebook’s Free Basics program as hatred of the poor, Senator Richard Burr was saying some very confused and wrong things about encryption, and 50 Cent filed a stupid, hypocritical lawsuit over another rapper’s mixtape. Another NSL challenge was made public, and the court decided the government could keep the gag order in place indefinitely, while one of Congress’s biggest defenders of NSA surveillance was suddenly aghast that the NSA may have spied on him. We also wrote about the forgotten danger of the TPP’s stronger trade secrets protections, and how the DMCA has delivered us into the hands of the proprietary internet of disconnected things.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010-2011, we wrote about Wikileaks, intermediary chokepoints, and the “dissent tax”. We also looked at permission culture and the automated diminishment of fair use, and reiterated why cocktails neither need nor deserve copyright protection. NBC Universal and the MPAA got New York City to run some “anti-piracy” propaganda, Gibson got an injunction over PaperJamz that ordered retailers to stop selling them, and RapidShare hired a big DC lobbying firm to convince politicians that the RIAA and MPAA were lying about it. Also, just for fun, we took a look at some predictions for the year that had been published 80 years prior.

Filed Under: history, look back