This Week In Techdirt History: December 3rd – 9th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, we looked at the utter failure of FOSTA as more lives were put at risk, while we learned more about why Facebook changed its priorities to support the bill, and then one of the most high-profile impacts happened with Tumblr banning sexual content (and then Facebook unveiled new rules about the words you can use). There was a push to use the lame duck session of Congress to pass an awful plan to politicize the Copyright Office, and ongoing fights about Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive. Meanwhile, the FCC tried to bury a report showing many broadband users don’t get the speed they pay for, an FCC Commissioner accused the agency of a net neutrality coverup, and the telecom lobby was undermining the industry’s own claims about net neutrality.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, a lobbyist was insisting that his meeting about “TPP IP Issues” was not in fact about that at all, the European Commission was trying and failing to justify the inclusion of corporate sovereignty in the TPP, we balked at how many countries were supporting a Life+70 copyright term, and even the Holy See came out with criticism of the TPP. Canada, for some reason, was changing its laws to support the recently-dead ACTA agreement, and also rolling out new cyberbullying legislation that quickly expanded in scope. Meanwhile, the MPAA “settled” another “victory” against Hotfile, and we got one of the funnier entries in the Prenda saga when Paul Duffy responded to a reporter by saying he couldn’t comment because he was devastated by Nelson Mandela’s death.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, a UK law firm running a settlement letter scheme was in hot water and losing clients as Atari backed away from it and a porn company said it had been lied to about the details of the plan (while the UK released a bunch of confusing guidelines about legal and illegal porn). Widespread protests confronted Australia’s latest internet censorship campaign, the European Council was standing behind its push for a three strikes rule, Warner Music was trying to get universities to pay a music tax, and the MPAA was trying a new argument in its attempts to require selectable output controls. Also, we saw a major event in an ongoing legal drama when a judge banned Bratz dolls, and the beginning of another noteworthy intellectual property fight when Joe Satriani sued Coldplay.