This Week In Techdirt History: July 19th - 25th
from the that-thing-that-happened dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2015, MPAA emails revealed a plan for an anti-google smear campaign run through the Today Show and the Wall Street Journal, Sony/Soundcloud pulled out the copyright takedown hammer over entries in an official remix contest, a UK court ruling flip-flopped on CD ripping for personal use, and we joined IMDb and Reddit in getting hit by a bogus DMCA takedown from a German film distributor — though this wasn't the dumbest takedown of the week, with a company representing Universal Pictures managing to accidentally DMCA the localhost IP address. Meanwhile the UK police admitted to investigating journalists for covering the Snowden leaks, the New York Times falsely claimed ISIS was using encryption and couriers because of Snowden, and a judge ordered the CIA to pay the hefty legal fees of a FOIA requester.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2010, the US Copyright Group was moving to phase two of its lawsuit shakedown plan, human rights groups were speaking out about the huge problems with the USTR's "special 301" process, and America's IP czar was pointing fingers at China. A Dutch court upheld the ruling that The Pirate Bay must block Dutch users while the Pirate Party in Sweden was launching its own "Pirate ISP", a Canadian court let Perfect 10's latest case against Google move forward, and the BSA was using totally made up stats to try to change copyright laws in South Africa. Meanwhile, we wrote about how weak anti-SLAPP laws don't help anyone, while the Senate in the US passed the SPEECH Act to shut down libel tourism.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2005, the Associated Press was blatantly misrepresenting BitTorrent, while News Corp was buying in to sketchy adware. We wrote about how the recording industry believes what it wants to believe, and asked why public schools should be doing copyright dirty work for entertainment companies. A silly but unsurprising backlash emerged against mobile phones due to their possible use by terrorists, while rumors were brewing about the iPod Video, even though most people still weren't sold on mobile video as a concept. And voters in Louisiana saw through telco threats and FUD, and voted for a muni fiber network.
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Ah, the MPAA. Under normal circumstances Google would have had plenty to criticize and scrutinize over. It's not as though it's a company that doesn't have blood on its hands, or at least incriminating information about how user privacy is handled.
It's not like the only entities who have a bone to pick with Google are copyright maximalists either. Any big organization - especially in tech - is bound to have kind of discrimination surface eventually. But nah, the MPAA couldn't wait for the virgin cuck programmer manifesto to be written so they thought writing a super-secret boys' club memo to Jim Hood would be a marked improvement, because who could possibly beat copyright enforcement security protocol?
It's funny how the MPAA fell victim to the one thing that they delight in accusing pirates of: an inability to wait and wanting things "now, now, now". They could have waited for Google to piss off enough people with disrespect against minorities and YouTube fucking over its community with ContentID, then team up with the "I hate Google" forces and present themselves as a savior from the ashes. But they couldn't do it. Even when the opportunity is given to them on a silver platter the MPAA just can't stop fucking up everything they touch.
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