This Week In Techdirt History: May 7th - 13th
from the years-and-years dept
Five Years Ago
It was the previous week in 2012 that we learned the sad news of the death of the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch (better known as MCA), and it was this week that the EFF called for an end to the war on sampling as a tribute to his legacy. Little did we know that, the very next day, Tuf America would sue the Beastie Boys over an unauthorized sample, which is some stunningly insensitive timing. And that wasn't the only copyright fuckup related to MCA's death — the co-creator of The Chappelle Show uploaded a previously unaired video of the Beastie Boys preforming for the show, only to have it taken down by a Viacom copyright claim.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2007, NBC was getting in on the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit with an amicus brief against the latter, while the government of Thailand was blocking the site entirely and considering its own lawsuit. Newspaper publishers, struggling to adapt to the web, were alternately scraping together data to portray their digital efforts as successful and blaming the internet for all their industry's woes. And "psychic" (read: mediocre magician) Uri Geller was abusing the DMCA and filing lawsuits in an attempt to censor a popular debunking of his little tricks by James Randi.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2002, we took a look at the absolute mess that was MusicNet, the attempt by major labels to offer a competitive digital music platform. The world was still for some reason debating whether video games are free speech, and a judge ruled that the DMCA was constitutional via an odd distinction regarding speech and software. Before mobile phones replaced the landline all but entirely, there was an earlier fear about them replacing people's second phone lines. And long, long before the west would see anything similar, Japan was adding wi-fi to 4000 McDonald's locations.
One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years Ago
America's oldest weekly newspaper that is still in publication is the Cambridge Chronical, and it was on May 7th, 1846 that the first issue was published, just a few days after Cambridge was incorporated as a city. Of course, like most old community newspapers, its recent history of sales and mergers has left it somewhat disconnected from its roots.
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