This Week In Techdirt History: September 14th – 21st

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, an appeals court issued a worrying ruling about handing IP addresses to the FBI, while the DOJ was trying to get Apple and Google to hand over names and phone numbers of 10,000 app users. A better appeals court ruling also arrived, saying that the CFAA can’t be used to stop web scraping, but the internet remained broken in the world of the Ninth and Third Circuits. The New York Times published a completely backward take on Section 230, while Twitter was standing up for the users behind the Devin Nunes parody accounts. And we took another look at the whole concept of “intellectual property”.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee were still grappling with CIA torture report redactions, while Reuters was downplaying the very idea of torture with obscuring language. Newly released memos justifying warrantless wiretapping gave a closer look at the incredible authority of the executive branch, while we looked at the role of “trusted third parties” in the government accessing your data. We published a big explainer on net neutrality while the “Internet Slowdown” protest pushed hundreds of thousands of FCC comments and calls to congress. And we continued our reporting on the saga of the invention of email…

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, Hollywood was continuing its all-out assault on Redbox, the complaints against Google book scanning were reaching ridiculous levels, and we looked at how the UK government extrapolated 136 self-reported file sharers into an absurd figure of seven million. We also examined the RIAA’s copyright propaganda for schoolkids, and the way performing rights groups funnel money to a few top acts. There was another example of music licensing harming the DVD release of a classic TV show, and a good ruling in a copyright case over a Seinfeld cookbook. Also, this was the week of the somewhat famous “we don’t roll that way” response from the Ellen DeGeneres show to accusations of copyright infringement.