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

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.