This Week In Techdirt History: October 26th – November 1st

from the ’twas-ever-thus dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the RIAA tossed out a bogus DMCA claim to get a YouTube downloading tool pulled from Github, and was still flooding Twitch with takedowns that the company was responding to by freaking out and courting a lot of outrage from the users it failed to defend. Meanwhile, YouTuber Lindsay Ellis released an in-depth video about the most entertaining DMCA dust-up of the year. We called out Mark Zuckerberg for betraying the open web and putting his support behind Section 230 reform, just in time for congress to release yet another bad 230 reform bill and call more tech CEOs in for an internet grievance session. Also, the FCC ignored the courts and finalized its net neutrality repeal.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we walked through the ways you could tell that so-called cybersecurity bill CISA was in fact a surveillance bill, which was then made quite clear when the Senate rejected every single amendment that could have helped protect privacy, and then passed the bad bill with a 74 to 21 vote. Senator Whitehouse was mad about pushback on his effort to expand the CFAA, and we dedicated an episode of the podcast to discussing just how much of a mess our hacking laws are. New York’s AG launched a belated net neutrality investigation while T-Mobile wandered into a net neutrality minefield with a zero rating plan, and the Library of Congress released a hot mess of DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the absurdity of selective DMCA exemptions was on full display in a case where an Xbox jailbreaker was facing three years in prison while jailbreaking iPhones was legal. Universal was fighting against fair use in the infamous dancing baby video lawsuit, a judge ordered Limewire to shut down, and Facebook was continuing with boldly broad notions about what its trademarks should cover. Long before CISA we saw an earlier example of how “cyberwar” hype was used to argue for surveillance, we dug into how ACTA transformed secondary infringement into a crime, and Myriad Genetics appealed the ruling that invalidated gene patents.

Filed Under: history, look back