This Week In Techdirt History: April 16th – 22nd

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, Trump was being weird about the TPP, Apple was not doing so great in its attempts to prevent leaks, and another vendor appeared selling tools to crack iPhones. The MPAA silently shut down its legal movie search engine, the music industry was looking at moving past site-blocking into app-blocking, and MLB used copyright to shut down a Twitter account that shared cool baseball GIFs. Russia broke the internet in an attempt to ban Telegram, a 19-year-old Canadian was facing criminal charges for downloading publicly-accessible documents, and the sex-worker-run social network set up in response to FOSTA/SESTA was… shut down by FOSTA/SESTA.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, the White House threatened to veto CISPA if it didn’t protect privacy, since in its existing form it would render online privacy agreements meaningless. But the House Rules Committee basically rejected any amendments that would protect privacy, and Rep. Mike Rogers infamously claimed that the bill’s only opponents were “14 year olds in their basement” (leading to a flood of replies saying, um, no). And then, of course, CISPA passed the house.

Meanwhile, there was also so much Prenda news to catch up on that we ran a post titled Prenda, Prenda, Prenda, Prenda, Prenda. And then even that turned out not to be enough, as on Friday we had one more post about Prenda.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, NBC Universal was saying it should be Apple’s responsibility to stop piracy, Comcast skipped an FCC hearing when it couldn’t pack the seats with supporters, and Warner Bros. hired the cop who built the case against the Pirate Bay in Sweden. Speaking of the Pirate Bay, it was hitting back at the IFPI over being blocked by Danish ISPs (while, more broadly, the ISP practice of injecting content into websites was on the rise). We took a look at the USPTO’s terrible “education curriculum”, and tackled the popular “gotcha” question about whether you would want brain surgery performed by an experienced surgeon or Wikipedia. And though it was already an old story at the time, one of the legal fights over the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee Mod reared its head.