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

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, hypocrisy was on full display as the GOP went from whining about net neutrality to supporting Trump’s attack on social media (which the FCC was too afraid to go on record in support of while also rejecting its own legal arguments about net neutrality), and from defanging the FEC to complaining about Twitter’s moderation practices. We looked at Bill Barr’s farcical antitrust attack on Google and wrote about why even antitrust supporters should be disappointed in it. We also learned about how, despite the idea that Facebook was biased against conservatives, Mark Zuckerberg had personally agreed to diminish the reach of left-leaning sites.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, the cable industry was still clinging to the idea that cord cutting was a fad, the BBC blocked VPN access to its on-demand service even for UK viewers, and we wondered how much of the $90 million settlement in the RIAA’s case against Pandora would actually go to artists. The Senate was pushing forward with the CISA cybersecurity bill, though Sheldon Whitehouse was freaking out that his terrible amendment to make it even worse was rejected before it moved forward with the support of 83 senators. Also, Wikimedia’s lawsuit over NSA surveillance was dismissed for lack of standing.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, Blizzard used a very dubious copyright theory to sue the creators of Starcraft 2 cheats, the English Heritage organization was trying to claim it holds effective copyright on all photos of Stonehenge, and the MPAA was praising plans for censorship of websites under COICA. Viacom hired a former solicitor general to lead its appeal in its case against YouTube, the current Attorney General was citing debunked stats about piracy, and the EU Court of Justice struck down an attempt to collect a private copying levy from device makers in Spain. We also wrote about how authors don’t create in a vacuum, and it’s bad that copyright pretends they do.