This Week In Techdirt History: April 29th - May 5th
from the stuff-that-happened dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2013, while the MPAA was being accused of tampering with evidence in Finland, and a bunch of movie studios were fragmenting the streaming market by pulling films off Netflix, Chris Dodd was trying to claim he supports helping the blind while refusing to approve of the copyright exceptions that would do so. Meanwhile, the government was clashing with technology on many fronts, from increased censorship requests to Google to the DOJ wanting to fine companies that don't let it wiretap users to ICE raiding mobile phone repair shops.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2008, the RIAA was employing the questionable strategy of giving music services a bunch of publicity by suing them and the ugly strategy of aggressively targeting college students, while a court was thankfully rejecting its "making available" argument about copyright law. We took a look at all the problems copyright was causing for documentary filmmakers, and the smear campaign against Larry Lessig and free culture in general. And, for something that looks amusing in hindsight, many people were predicting that the mobile web was a huge threat to Google's dominance.
Fifteen Years Ago
Both of this week's stars were in the news in 2003 as well. We got a look at how the MPAA stays one step ahead of consumer rights organizations, while the RIAA was settling an earlier round of lawsuits against students, and also creepily sending threatening IMs to file sharers. Amidst this, Apple officially launched its online music sales for the first time — we were lukewarm on the idea, and of course at this point it was still laden with DRM.
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