This Week In Techdirt History: April 8th - 14th

from the the-way-it-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, Ken White returned to fill us in on the massive fallout from Prenda's hearing (as predicted), while the folks involved scrambled to get out of trouble — often by throwing each other under the bus. Paul Hansmeier played innocent, as did John Steele in his filing, both of them trying to turn the blame onto Brett Gibbs, who hit back with his own defence. And while Prenda and Paul Duffy fought hard to block any new evidence from being brought into the case, Judge Wright was having none of that and accepted new evidence from Morgan Pietz.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, we found out that e-voting problems were in some cases even worse than people thought, but while Congress was failing to do anything about it, some states were hard at work on fixing things. Meanwhile, we got a pair of examples of people using litigation instead of, you know, actually competing: ConnectU's settlement with Facebook, and Mattel/Hasbro's ongoing attempts to get rid of Scrabulous. And we had a big, long post looking at the deluge of amicus briefs in the Supreme Court's critical Bilski case on software and business model patents.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, there was lots of talk about spam, including the legal landmine for employers created by porn spam, and the overall fact that the battle against spam was not going well. One spammer tried to sue an anti-spammer for signing him up for a bunch of spam via his publicly posted business address, but the court very quickly smacked that down. And then the Senate introduced an anti-spam bill, though there was no reason to believe it would accomplish much.

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Filed Under: history, look back


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  1. This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 16 Apr 2018 @ 9:10am

    Them were the days, when you had Prenda law to dissect...

    In far too much detail. That was during Masnick's lawyer fetish period. Doesn't do it now only because stupid.

    Also, a skim of https://torrentfreak.com shows that in last five years copyright as such emerged better thanunscathed, but strenghtened. Pirates are now being JAILED, not just civil fines. -- Warned you pirates that was inevitable with increase of your thefts: businesses are not going to be idle.

    Anyhoo, though Techdirt trumpets itself -- because no one else will -- IN FACT, pirates have lost. Techdirt is just on slow glide to earth, like a feather after bird was hit by airplane: though it spins and whirls, sometimes even goes up, it's just due to chance winds, has ZERO effect on the world.

    By the way: my comments are featured on the front page, claimed to be taken apart by an "insightful" fanboy! Don't miss reading! All that's actually necessary here s for my common sense, common law comments to be SEEN. -- n the original piece (take the link), they're censored, Techdirt's only real weapon. -- And it's illegal, simply viewpoint discrimination in violation of the forms contract here. Enforcement on that is in the pipeline, though, because tiny little web sites are just simply not Licensed by CDA to be CENSORS!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    DB (profile), 16 Apr 2018 @ 9:39am

    I thought that it didn't need to be mentioned

    The Prenda saga showed that the people lauded by copyright maximalists were sociopaths, exploiting any law that let them easily extort money.

    Steele and Hansmeier both moved onto ADA extortion after their copyright extortion schemes were stopped.

    It's astonishing that people will still defend their actions, long after their schemes were shown to be abusive and fraudulent.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 16 Apr 2018 @ 10:54am

    Re: Them were the days, when you had Prenda law to dissect...

    All that's actually necessary here s for my common sense, common law comments to be SEEN. -- n the original piece (take the link), they're censored, Techdirt's only real weapon. -- And it's illegal, simply viewpoint discrimination in violation of the forms contract here. Enforcement on that is in the pipeline, though, because tiny little web sites are just simply not Licensed by CDA to be CENSORS!

    Every single word of that is gibberish.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 16 Apr 2018 @ 5:28pm

    Re: Pirates are now being JAILED

    You mean, like the ones running the Pirate Bay?

    Shutting that down was a major coup for Big Content, wasn’t it?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 16 Apr 2018 @ 7:29pm

    Re:

    > MPAA and RIAA Still Can't Go After Megaupload

    Yeah, that's better than unscathed. Whatever puts your copyright cock to sleep at night, blue boy.

    Paul Hansmeier's trial got delayed until the latter half of the year. Presumably so he can settle his affairs before pulling off a disappearing act like his colleague Duffy.

    The hilarious punchline is you spending so much time on a website you consider to be so insignificant you attempt to wax lyrical about it...

    link to this | view in thread ]


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