This Week In Techdirt History: August 4th – 10th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, “free speech defender” Devin Nunes filed more lawsuits against critics and vowed they weren’t the last, the New York Times joined the parade of media organizations that were totally and completely misrepresenting Section 230, and the recording industry was reaping what it sowed in the world of copyright run amok. An oversight report showed the NSA did not delete all the phone records it claimed it had, the European Court of Justice released rulings on three big copyright cases, and a judge was not impressed with the DOJ’s attempt to claim presidential tweets and orders didn’t mean anything. We also wrote a piece wondering why our first response to mass shootings is to talk about censorship.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, comic artist Randy Queen began a crusade with a bunch of DMCA takedown notices targeting critical blog posts, which he then followed up by claiming that a post about this copyright abuse was defamatory, and then kept digging by issuing even more DMCA takedowns. An appeals court used a bogus Sherlock Holmes case as an opportunity to slam copyright trolling and suggest there might be antitrust violations, the City of London Police were doing Hollywood’s bidding, and a new report challenged the idea that the IP industries rely on strong IP. This was also the week that Google ramped up its push to secure the internet by using HTTPS as a search ranking signal.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, the debacle of the Associated Press’s attempt to DRM the news got even sillier as people discovered its text licensing system would sell licenses that it had no right to sell, while Reuters stepped up in support of linking, excerpting, and sharing. Some students were arrested for jailbreaking video game consoles, Twitter was sued for patent infringement in Texas, and Fox joined the war on Redbox. We asked why America was banning books when an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye was blocked from publication, and we looked at the growing problem of jurisdictional disputes on a borderless internet. Also, in a trend that would very much take hold, people were talking about how Facebook was starting to become uncool.