This Week In Techdirt History: November 5th – 11th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, there was another failed attempt to hold Twitter responsible for terrorism, while we were taking a closer look at the massive influence campaigns and coordinated election interference happening on the platform. AT&T began kicking pirates off the internet, the Supreme Court rejected the telecom industry’s calls to hear a net neutrality case, and the FCC was pretending to do something about robocalls. Meanwhile, Manhattan DA Cy Vance was calling for federally-mandated encryption back doors.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, it turned out Team Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier had moved on to suing companies over supposed ADA violations, and it sure was keeping him busy, while Prenda itself was seeing the big losses (and the big bills) continue to pile up. Meanwhile, NSA defenders were rejecting a clemency appeal that Ed Snowden never actually made and favorably comparing metadata collection to stop-and-frisk, as both Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee came out with stern condemnations of NSA surveillance and we looked at the major media bias towards NSA defenders and the many examples of chilling effects created by the surveillance.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, we learned more about the funny incident in which the video for Weird Al’s Don’t Download This Song had the names of filesharing tools bleeped out. A UK ISP was trying to wage war on open WiFi by threatening to disconnect anyone with an open network, authors in Italy were calling for a you-must-be-a-pirate tax on all DSL connections, and the Copyright Alliance was begging the Supreme Court to make remote DVRs illegal (while we wondered why the MPAA had secured the power to review and test DVD players). And another video game executive was attacking the existence of used game sales, while Motorola started trying to block used phone sales.