This Week In Techdirt History: June 3rd - 9th
from the it-happened dept
Five Years Ago
The big news this week in 2013 came from leaked documents revealing that the NSA was harvesting call data from millions of Verizon subscribers, followed by a Washington Post report saying the agency had direct access to information from Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple and more. The NSA was quick to try to deny it and weasel out of the accusations, while Senators revealed that they already knew all about it, and James Clapper tried to place the blame on journalists for revealing the spying. Both Verizon and the other tech companies tried to deny things with carefully chosen words, and the Washington Post tried to quietly backtrack on its claims.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2008, the Supreme Court refused to let MLB continue fighting to claim ownership of facts, while others were telling Viacom it should hope to lose its lawsuit against YouTube. UK authorities were charging users of the OiNK filehsaring network of conspiracy, while the push for a Canadian DMCA was rearing its head again and causing controversy. And the first attempt to academically look at takedown notices found, unsurprisingly, that a whole lot of them are garbage.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2003, the RIAA was launching a new lawsuit against Morpheus while EMI was joining Universal in suing Napster's investors. One Senator was trying to rein in the anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA, while the Supreme Court was ruling that using public domain content doesn't require crediting the creator. And in a massive too-little-too-late move, Metallica finally put some music online.
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The weeks that followed would see him argue that any attempt to change the government in a way that the government didn't like was inherently reprehensible, and nobody cared about metadata anyway. He would then vanish when it was proven that the NSA was, in fact, vacuuming up metadata, culminating in the theft of James Comey's metadata by someone else.
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