This Week In Techdirt History: June 21st - 27th
from the as-I-recall dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2015, the Sunday Times in the UK was doubling down on its widely criticized article in which it parroted the government's talking points, while the GCHQ was in trouble for illegally holding onto emails (but not for collecting them in the first place). New documents released by Wikileaks revealed that the NSA had been spying on French presidents (which France was not happy with, even though it was moving to do more spying of its own), while the FISA court was tackling questions about Section 215 surveillance. We also learned about Google being gagged for four years from talking about fighting the Wikileaks investigation, including some ridiculous redactions required by the DOJ.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2010, a closely-watched lawsuit about the "hot news doctrine" was drawing interest from across the board, with Google and Twitter weighing in to oppose the return of the doctrine while a huge group of newspaper publishers were predictably taking the other side, and internet rights groups were stepping in to tackle the First Amendment issues. We saw an extremely terrible ruling in the Golan case saying it's okay to remove content from the public domain, and another very good ruling with the court smacking down Viacom in its lawsuit against Google (which left Viacom in denial).
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2005, the MPAA was refusing to give up and making yet another attempt to get the Broadcast Flag enshrined in law, while at the same time embarrassing itself with wild overhype about shutting down a DVD processing plant — which it tried to explain away by claiming it was calculating projections of future piracy. Politicians in the EU were making it clear that they really didn't understand software patents, but were moving forward with them anyway, while the US Register of Copyrights was proposing major changes in copyright law. We also saw the start of yet another important appeal about the DMCA.
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Comcast 5G
Comcast is assigning 5Gz Wi-Fi as 5G and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi as 4G. Guess they can fool most of their customers all of the time!
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Just like Prenda's defeat, unsurprisingly the trolls crawled out of their woodwork to bemoan the Viacom decision. Naturally, none of them could come up with an explanation for "Why should Google be punished for Viacom uploading Viacom content onto YouTube" and devolved into the typical "Ooooh, I hate you Masnick!" fist-shaking demonstration.
Tom Sydnor and Bill Rosenblatt were at least smart enough to never darken the doorstep again, although the same cannot be said of TAM...
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I went back an re-read the Golan article. I had forgotten about that public domain clawback.
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NSA Spying on French Presidents
Had to laugh at the France was upset that NSA was spying on their presidents. Even during the cold war the French spied on the US even more than the USSR did.
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