This Week In Techdirt History: March 4th - 10th

from the the-more-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

The saga of Prenda Law really jumped into high gear this week in 2013, first with Prenda, John Steel and Paul Duffy all filing astonishing defamation lawsuits against critics. Then, as Brett Gibbs was finally forced to answer a few questions, the judge ordered everyone to show up in court the following Monday. We speculated about what would happen, while John Steele dropped his defamation lawsuit, leaving only the other two to continue. A massive 300-page filing teased at new details, Brett Gibbs objected to pretty much everything, then Paul Duffy doubled down in truly insane fashion by demanding the IP addresses of every visitor to certain blogs in the past two years. And, unsurprisingly, the team tried desperately to get out of having to show up in court on Monday.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, the House made the tiny positive move of removing higher copyright fines from the Pro IP bill (without interfering with all the other awful, awful stuff of course), while we asked why we continue to use the term "intellectual property" at all. HBO was still ever-so-gently dipping its toe into online distribution, while Trent Reznor was diving in head-first and swimming strongly. Meanwhile, as audio DRM continued to die at the hands of most major online retailers, a lot of journalists got really confused and thought it meant the death of copyright (if only!)

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, there were rumours about that Apple would launch an online music store — and they'd come true just under two months later. Australia was admitting the failure of its recommended online content filters while China was apparently slowing down access across the country with its surveillance efforts. And in case you forgot just how different the web was in 2003: an investigation discovered the bizarre fact that the RIAA's website was hosted by one man out of his house, reports of which led them to move it to a server run by a small accounting firm. Go figure.

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Filed Under: history, look back