This Week In Techdirt History: July 23rd - 29th
from the stuff-that-happened dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2012, we started out by reporting on something that happened late on the previous Friday: the feds admitted that they violated the fourth amendment with their surveillance programs. We noted how Congress had lost all perspective with its moves to prosecute journalists as if they were spies, and that it was worrying how the Senate Intelligence Committee seemed more interested in stopping whistleblowers than figuring out why they blew the whistle. Meanwhile, the ACLU lost a fight to get the courts to recognize common sense and agree that widely published leaked documents should no longer be treated as classified.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2007, the RIAA was continuing its push to get radio stations to pay up for playing music by finding people to claim that radio play makes people buy less music. Meanwhile, a disturbingly RIAA-friendly change snuck into the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, potentially cutting funding from schools that don't filter P2P traffic (but was thankfully pulled soon after). The UK government, amidst various forms of copyright insanity, at least realized that extending copyright durations on 50-year-old songs was pointless. And the EFF kicked off a now-famous legal battle when it sued Universal Music for issuing a YouTube takedown over a clip of a little kid dancing to music.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2002, we saw one of the most insane attempts to prop up Hollywood of them all: a bill that would exempt them from hacking laws in their expeditions to find pirates was introduced in Congress. Meanwhile, the huge uncertainty caused by recent changes to royalty rates was threatening the future of webcasters, leading to a bill being introduced to save them. And a silly Texas company that had turned itself into a JPEG patent troll got some serious pushback from the ISO standards body.
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But that was 10 years ago. What's the situation now? Because I don't see an inundation of copyright-expired Beatles recordings that I had hoped for (not to mention heaps of 1950's music that I'm sick of buying CD's of only to find out they are full of "recordings by one or more of the original band")
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How Much Did Forgent Profit From That JPEG Patent?
Considering they got $100 million out of Yahoo alone ...
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They would find people to claim that singing in the shower costs them money if they though that they could get a law passed that everybody had to buy a performance license.
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