This Week In Techdirt History: June 11th - 17th

from the a-saga-begins dept

Five Years Ago

It was this week in 2012 that The Oatmeal wrote a level-headed criticism of FunnyJunk and received, in return, a somewhat scattershot threat of a defamation lawsuit. As a result, a whole lot of internet attention and ire was turned on one man, whose name we'd become very familiar with: Charles Carreon, who dug in his heels and tried to shut down The Oatmeal's fundraiser. Then he lashed out and accused Matt Inman of "instigating security attacks", and then swore he'd find some legal avenue by which to go after Inman. The saga, as you know, will continue in future weeks...

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, media companies continued to pile on to YouTube with money-grab lawsuits. Sports leagues were actively fighting to claim ownership of facts about games, with the NCAA ejecting a reporter for live-blogging and Major League Baseball taking its legal fight over fantasy leagues to the appeals court. The MPAA and RIAA teamed up to create yet another lobbying group hot on the heels of the new Copyright Alliance, AT&T decided to start filtering infringing content for Hollywood, and a worrying court ruling ordered TorrentSpy to collect and hand over additional data on its users.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, in an act that practically defined "too little, too late", Sony and Universal announced plans to cut prices on digital music downloads. The BSA was beating its usual drum about the dangers of software piracy, the government was floundering when it came to internal use of technology, and the geeks in Silicon Valley were continuing to get more political. It was also this week that the late, great David Bowie shared some of his refreshingly forward-looking thoughts on copyright in the digital age, saying "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing." Almost everything he said about the nature of the coming change was correct, but he underestimated the power, tenacity and deep pockets of those who continue to fight tooth and nail against it.

Ninety-Seven Years Ago

Most cliches exist for a reason — though tired, they are apt. It's easy to forget they had to come from somewhere, and fun to find out where that was. And so this week we celebrate the birth of a common political cliche: the "smoke-filled room" where big decisions are made by powerful people. It was on June 11th, 1920 that Raymond Clapper of the United Press first used the term to describe the nomination process for Warren G. Harding at the Republican National Convention, presumably not knowing it would enter the lexicon as a go-to shorthand.

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Filed Under: history, look back