This Week In Techdirt History: January 21st - 27th

from the how-many-roads dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, the world continued to react to the death of Aaron Swartz, with more attention being turned towards prosecutorial misconduct, and direct criticism of the handling of Swartz's case — though US Attorney Carmen Ortiz doubled down and said her office wouldn't change anything. Meanwhile, we looked at the many other cases of prosecutors bullying "hackers", while misguided editors at the Globe & Mail were spewing nonsense and hackathons around the world were preparing to carry on Aaron Swartz's work.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, while AT&T was getting ready to filter copyrighted content at the ISP level, Time Warner was rolling out its overage charges for heavy users — and, funny thing, Time Warner-owned HBO was simultaneously putting its shows online for the first time. And Canadian lobbyists were pushing to make ISPs liable for piracy themselves. Meanwhile, we saw too trends in their infancy: adults moving into the young person's world of social media (to the consternation of many young people), and PC game companies experimenting with the freemium model that would later become a staple of mobile gaming (this was before the PC publishers figured out they could charge $60 for the game and have microtransactions).

Fifteen Years Ago

Early this week in 2003, it was the RIAA seeking money from ISPs, with then-head Hillary Rosen calling for a P2P levy — though a journalist who called the RIAA found them denying she said it, and claiming the opposite. But then, midweek, Rosen announced her resignation. Meanwhile, Microsoft was introducing its own DRM technology, while Sony was trying out some DRM that charged people $2 to copy a song from a CD. Amidst this anti-circumvention obsession, tech firms were getting more aggressive in their fight against Hollywood's DRM demands.

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Filed Under: history, look back