This Week In Techdirt History: October 2nd - 8th

from the different-and-not-so-different dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2011, the Supreme Court let stand an important ruling that downloads are not public performances. Of course, some media rushed to interpret this as saying that unauthorized music downloads are legal, but this was not at all the case. Meanwhile, a former anti-piracy investigator was admitting how he fed the police cases and inflated piracy statistics, and over in Australia, the band Men At Work shockingly lost its appeal over use of a brief riff from a folk song that went unnoticed for decades.

Also this week in 2011, the world said hello to Siri — and, sadly, goodbye to Steve Jobs.

Ten Years Ago

Speaking of inflated piracy statistics, this week in 2006 we watched how they become accepted facts as an utterly bogus industry report started being parroted by news organizations. At least one Swedish court was demanding actual evidence from the recording industry. Yahoo, Amazon and Apple were all dragged into a copyright lawsuit over sampling in a Run DMC song, too.

The HP spying scandal's latest development was felony charges against former chairwoman Patricia Dunn, and a new and still extremely dubious rumor started spreading that would eventually come to pass: there were whispers of Google buying YouTube.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2001, the notion of broadband connections in the home was still struggling to take sustainable hold, and the notion of internet access in airplanes was put on hold for a while. Meanwhile, the notion of a 3D web refused to die. Thanks to the epidemic of pop-ups, the internet got its first taste of rudimentary ad blockers, but they didn't work great and websites were already starting to fight back. And the recording industry was continuing its campaign against file sharing services by sweeping up with a new lawsuit against Music City and Kazaa.

Thirty-One Years Ago

Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation, creator of the GNU, has been one of the driving forces and defining voices in the entire open source movement — and it was founded on October 4th, 1985.

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