This Week In Techdirt History: May 23rd - 29th

from the memory-palace dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, Paramount announced its intention to back down from its lawsuit against the fan film Axanar, though not before the filmmakers got their next filing in. The legal battles over the FBI's hacking tools and malware continued, while the Senate Intelligence Committee was expanding the bureau's NSL powers with a secret amendment.

This is also the week we first heard the rapidly-confirmed accusation that Peter Thiel was financing Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, and started writing about how worrying the situation was.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, ICE kicked off round four of its domain seizures and we continued looking at why the whole program is unconsitutional and how the Justice Department was stalling to avoid lawsuits in response. Meanwhile, the Patriot Act renewal moved forward, with only eight Senators presenting an obstacle and Harry Reid procedurally routing around attempts to fix it, eventually leading to a successful renewal.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2006, a desperate attempt to declare open source licenses a violation of antitrust law predictably failed as the lawsuit was thrown out, while the RIAA's lawsuit against XM radio appeared to be generating publicity for the company's newest device, and TV networks and studios launched a new suit against Cablevision over its network-based DVR. People were beginning to predict the death of MySpace, Verizon was trying to claim that passing on info to credit agencies was a gift to consumers, and we noted how crime reporting would often pointlessly focus on Wi-Fi if it was even tangentially involved. Also, this appears to be the very first time we wrote about a newfangled buzzword: "crowdsourcing".

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Filed Under: history, look back