This Week In Techdirt History: June 27th - July 3rd

from the that's-how-it-went dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, the Copyright Office was pushing a dangerous plan to strip websites of DMCA harbors, Google and Facebook were using copyright tools to take down extremist content, and lawmakers in Europe were floating the dumb idea of letting robots and computers have copyrights. Malibu Media was getting called out by a judge while also launching a lawsuit against its former lawyer, while two other important rulings in copyright cases stated that an IP address is not a person. We also took a closer look at Hillary Clinton's problematic tech platform and vague and confusing intellectual property platform.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, early hacktivist group LulzSec announced plans to disband, and we looked at the impact this kind of hacktivism was having while the RIAA was citing such groups as another reason for passing the PROTECT IP act. Sony's CEO was blaming its own hacking woes on people wanting everything for free, while PS3 jailbreaker George Hotz (aka GeoHot) was hired by Facebook. Meanwhile, Righthaven's troubles continued with racketeering claims brought in South Carolina and similar claims made in Nevada, while the company was begging to be put back into a case it was dismissed from and trying to avoid sanctions by blaming its lawyer. Amidst this, we looked at the silver lining of Righthaven's activities: they helped to establish a much more expansive view of fair use when it comes to copying newspaper articles.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2006, newspapers were at the peak of their efforts to block people from reading their work for free online. The fact that IP addresses are not people (and weren't in 2006 either) was proving an effective way of getting the RIAA to drop lawsuits. Amazon's plans to get into the video download business were leaked, while Metallica finally caved and decided to sell music downloads in iTunes, and Kazaa settled its lawsuit with the music industry and announced plans to go legit while Torrentspy was facing its own lawsuit and asking why Hollywood wasn't suing Google too.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: history, look back