This Week In Techdirt History: August 18th – 24th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, Beto O’Rourke (remember him?) joined the silly parade of politicians looking to destroy Section 230, while the Wall Street Journal was rightly calling out Josh Hawley’s “nannyish” internet law ideas. A Russian troll farm was taking a second shot at suing Facebook after its first attempt was dismissed on Section 230 grounds, and Devin Nunes’s discovery requests were revealing just how much of a fishing expedition he was going on. YouTube brought a lawsuit against a guy who tried to extort people through bogus DMCA takedowns, while MLB was claiming revenue from obviously fair use YouTube videos. And Facebook commenced a weird and pointless audit of political bias on the platform, while we ran the second part of our two-part podcast breaking down the FTC’s Facebook settlement.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Stefan Molyneux (remember him?) was abusing the DMCA to silence a critic despite styling himself as an anarcho-capitalist who opposes copyright. Hollywood was back to blaming the poor performance of a movie on piracy instead of on the movie sucking, Konami was flip-flopping on a fan-remake of Metal Gear, Getty threatened the wrong IP law firm in its copyright trolling efforts, and the UK courts doled out a stunning 33-month prison sentence for camcording a movie. Meanwhile, the unsealed transcript in the Jewel v. NSA case showed how much contempt the DOJ has for American citizens, and NSA whistleblower Bill Binney offered up some insight into the real reasons the NSA spies on everyone.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, we asked why it’s necessary or good for copyright to block unauthorized sequels to literary classics, while courts were continuing in their insane efforts to slice and dice the Superman copyright, and an incident around infringing architectural plans raised some thorny and fascinating copyright questions. A damages order in a Finnish court really highlighted how crazy the numbers were in the Jammie Thomas ruling, while we looked back at what might be the very first copyright trial in history. Also, though it had only launched the week prior, we were already seeing the power and promise of RECAP.