This Week In Techdirt History: December 10th - 16th
from the the-waning-year dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2012, more and more people were coming out against the efforts of the ITU's WCIT, including both Tim Berners-Lee joining the already-active Vint Cerf and Mozilla expressing its concerns. Though the White House denied that it was prepared to dump the ITU, it was firm in refusing to support a bad treaty. The ITU itself was doing a really bad job of pretending to respond to people's complaints, and even though a whole bunch of countries ended up refusing to sign the treaty, the boss decided to go ahead and declare victory anyway.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2007, people were digging in to the recently introduced PRO-IP bill, with the DOJ coming out against the legislation, even as Hollywood's favorite lawmaker complained it wasn't strong enough, and the inimitable William Patry explaining the many problems with the bill. North of the border, Canada was stalling out in its efforts to introduce its own version of the DMCA as public opposition continued to grow rapidly. And, in a piece of news that is especially amusing given recent events, people were just realizing that you could pretty much submit anything to the FCC's public comment system, including fake comedy entries claiming to be from Leon Trotsky, George W. Bush and... Donald Trump.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2002, there was a lot of uncertainty in the world of internet distribution and media distribution in general. We believed predictions that the DVD would be the last physical format, perhaps underestimating Hollywood's aggression on that front — like the fact that device makers appeared poised to give in to demands to put copy protection in everything. The Balkanization of the web into many walled gardens was becoming really concerning (though of course it was still silly for folks like the New York Times to be predicting "the end of free content"), but some folks like Tim O'Reilly were at least able to see the bigger picture on issues like piracy. And while it's easy to forget today that it wasn't always that easy or cheap to get yourself a web host for your small business (let alone personal) needs, in 2002 it was a big deal that a major player like Yahoo announced it would be getting into the small business hosting game.
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Media Storage
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Re: Media Storage
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Re: Back then we were all still very much in the mindset of physical media.
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Re: Re: Media Storage
Admittedly there were still lots of CD players around - portable ones, and hi-fi systems in the average home - so there was lots of reason to still burn CDs. But between Napster and the early MP3 players starting to come out and teasing us with their high price tags for storage space juuuuuuust big enough to be tantalizing but always a bit disappointing, it was pretty clear what direction things would be going.
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Re: Media Storage
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