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This Week In Techdirt History: June 5th - 11th

from the iirc dept

Sat, Jun 11th 2016 12:00pm — Leigh Beadon

Five Years Ago

This week in 2011, we were still looking at the previous week's hearings on pre-1972 sound recordings, where the RIAA was staunchly supporting the past extensions of copyright law while insisting that reducing copyright law would be unconstitutional, and leading us to ask would it really be so bad if The Beatles were public domain? This was all happening at the same time as the Golan case, which led us to underline how damaging it is to take works out of the public domain as well. Sadly, we also saw yet another loss for appropriation art in the courts, this time focused on a Run DMC painting.

Apple was launching its new Music Match service, with all the copyright questions it implied, but rightsholders couldn't seem to agree on how they felt about it — and alongside its competitors, it also highlighted the point that fragmenting the cloud is missing the point.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2006, the US government was pressuring other countries over foreign music sites for no obvious reason other than direct marching orders from the entertainment industry. This pressure, and the exportation of policy, was poised to stymie innovation globally just like the DMCA did at home. At least there were rumblings of more reasonable views on copyright coming from politicians in the UK and a former RIAA boss who came to her senses a little too late. Meanwhile, the copyright industries were lobbying for a pernicious legal change that would require licenses even for incidental copies such as cached files. But what the industry excelled at most was invoking the Streisand Effect on sites like AllOfMp3.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2001, we noted a trend towards centralization on the web, with fifty percent of online time being spent on four websites (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Napster). The dot-com bubble blame game was still going on and occasionally getting ugly, with violence and lawsuits. MIT had some interesting thoughts on how technology impacts linguistics, and we took an early look at how the very concept of copyright has been corrupted. Also, the Catholic Church made a digital decision: online confessions were declared not to be an option.

Finally, I think it's fair to say we were right to question Business Week's assertion that Apple "should not get back into the handheld market".

Thirty-Two Years Ago

It's one of the most famous and successful games of all time, and in some people's estimation it's the quintessential realization of what a "game" truly is. On June 6th, 1984, Tetris was first released.

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Filed Under: history, look back

4 Comments

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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 11 Jun 2016 @ 5:55pm

“Run DMCA Painting”
Heh-heh...
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 12 Jun 2016 @ 12:37am

Re: “Run DMCA Painting”
Heh... that is an excellent typo. Nevertheless, I have fixed it.
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nurullah, 12 Jun 2016 @ 8:20am

Re: “Run DMCA Painting”
that is great
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orbitalinsertion (profile), 12 Jun 2016 @ 9:39am

I'm not sure that anywhere in the most ridiculous claims of the up and coming "cloud" did providers and evangelists ever claim what the article seems to think it did. But then, i still see both humorous and serious commentary still, perhaps even more so as the trope has baked in, treating the cloud as this singular cloud, almost synonymous with the internet, that anyone just dumps anything into and anyone can pull it back out with any method they like. The cloud was never going to be like that, and it's always been an enterprise / provider feature that effectively has zero difference for the consumer. (It was supposed to be "transparent" after all. So what does it matter if you are actually assigned space on a particular storage device and a particular server or not, or if the server you are renting is virtual or not.) The weird mysterious individual consumer conception of the cloud... seems to have developed under it's own steam because the IT types kept throwing around the word "cloud" and marketeers for some reason though it was clever to use with respect to "home" consumers as well as businesses that actually know they are essentially buying into timesharing 2.0.

But who was ever going to sell you "hey you can do whatever you want" cloud when they have zero authority and ability to do so? (Never mind those who can't integrate their own related services, but will force on you service that you don't want integrated.)
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