This Week In Techdirt History: January 29th - February 4th

from the reflections dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, we watched as the reaction to ACTA continued to heat up. Though the opposition was in some danger of straying off course, there were some big developments: the Slovenian Ambassador apologized for signing the deal, the Polish Prime Minister suspended all efforts to ratify it, Bulgarian MPs followed in the footsteps of Polish MPs the week before and protested with Guy Fawkes masks, and widespread protests began to break out across Europe.

Meanwhile, the TPP was also on the docket for the week, with a stark example of crony capitalism presented by the USTR getting civil society groups kicked out of the Hollywood hotel where it was hobnobbing with entertainment industry elites. We pointed out that SOPA/PIPA should be a pretty good lesson on why these negotiations need to be way, way more transparent.

Also, this was the week we released the first Sky Is Rising report.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the world was still reacting to the newly Google-owned YouTube. The plans for revenue sharing with video creators were brewing, and while NBC was embracing the promotional value of YouTube clips, Viacom made its big move of telling Google to yank 100,000 videos off the service, setting the stage for the big legal feud to follow.

Also this week in 2007: Sony BNG reached a deal with the FTC for violating federal law with its horrible rootkit DRM, the RIAA had a SWAT team raid an Atlanta mix-tape producer on questionable legal grounds, Google was offering half-apologies for aiding Chinese censorship, and Adult Swim's now-infamous marketing stunt shut down the city of Boston.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years earlier in 2002, Google made a much more popular decision when it announced it would not use pop-up ads. Of course, that seems obvious now, as did other things that were fresh at the time, like the convergence of wireless devices and the possibility of having a laptop as your only computer. In the world of secondary effects from the dot-com bubble bursting, we saw Cisco grappling with a huge gray market for used IT products and folks to dropped out to work in tech going back to school to finish their degrees.

Also, because nothing is truly new: folks were commenting on how news was getting less factual and more opinionated.

One-Hundred And Seventy Years Ago

Though not in fact headquartered in the city itself, Techdirt does a whole lot of its business in and around San Francisco — so this week we're marking a milestone in that city's history. It was on January 30th, 1847 that its name was changed from Yerba Buena to San Francisco by Lt. Washington Allon Bartlett.

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Filed Under: history, look back