This Week In Techdirt History: November 19th – 25th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, the government agreed to delete data copied from a traveler’s phone after being hit with a “motion for return of property” while, in something of an inverse situation, prosecutors charged a suspect with evidence tampering after a seized iPhone was remotely wiped. Cord-cutting was setting more records while many cable giants were refusing to compete on price, and Comcast responded by reinventing the closed cable box. Another court ruling prevented cable giants from weaponizing the first amendment, the FCC was accused of burying data on the sorry state of US broadband, and MuckRock released the data from its national automatic license plate reader survey. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron was calling for widespread regulation of the internet.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, Sony was busy spoiling the fun yet again by taking down amusing fan edits, while Warner Bros. was admitting to issuing bogus DMCA takedowns and more or less boasting about how nobody could stop it. The USTR was lying about the implications of the TPP, while we got a look at the talking points for copyright maximalists defending the leaked IP chapter, and wondered where exactly the “free trade” was in all of this — then at the end of the week, Congress slammed the brakes on the agreement. Meanwhile, newly declassified documents showed how the NSA exploited pen register statutes and gave more details on bulk email collection, and then the latest Snowden document revealed the NSA’s deal with GCHQ to spy on UK citizens.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, we continued our informal series of posts examining the global financial crisis. The RIAA managed to get a law in Tennessee forcing universities to filter networks for copyrighted content, and got smacked down by a judge for trying to demand double the money in an agreed settlement, while the lawsuit over the constitutionality of RIAA lawsuits was heating up with an all-star witness list. An Australian ISP agreed to demands that it filter the internet just to demonstrate how stupid the plan was, while the country’s largest ISP was facing a lawsuit from movie studios for failing to magically stop infringement. And we got an early whiff of the firms that purposely seed copyrighted content on P2P networks in order to demand settlements.