This Week In Techdirt History: July 25th - 31st

from the plus-a-different-week dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, the hack of DNC emails was sweeping the news, revealing things that were important regardless of who conducted the hack (and some things that were just plain embarrassing) while we warned against any disastrous overreactions in response. We also highlighted Trump's worrying response as well as a ridiculous tidbit in the backlash from the DNC itself. IsoHunt settled the last of its lawsuits, an MPAA front group was attacking CloudFlare for not censoring the internet, and the TPP was meeting more resistance around the world. This was also the week that Verizon bought Yahoo, and of course it featured a continuation of the Monkey Selfie saga.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, governments were engaging in a propaganda war against hacktivist groups, Ron Wyden was pressing intelligence officials about their "secret" interpretation of the Patriot Act while other senators were trying to shift attention elsewhere, and Homeland Security was finally 'fessing up to the latest round of domain seizures. We saw worrying copyright rulings and laws in several countries including Sweden, Sierra Leone, and the UK (which offered up a double) — but perhaps the most concerning was in the US, where a judge put another nail in the coffin of the idea/expression dichotomy by allowing a photographer's lawsuit against Rihanna to move forward. But even more problematic than that was the CAFC ruling in the Myriad case that said individual genes can be patented.

Fifteen Years Ago

Well, this is an unusual one — as I was looking through posts for this section, I got a sense of deja vu, and had a realization: last month, I accidentally messed up the dates somehow and featured posts from this week in the flashback roundup for the final week of June. So you can go check out that link to see what happened this week in 2006, and today I've rounded up a few things that should have appeared in that post:

There were trends of gimmicky WiFi offerings and people blaming Google for their own failures; people were still working to figure out what Nathan Myhrvold was up to with Intellectual Ventures while the Supreme Court agreed to look into the question of patent obviousness; the Sony Rootkit fiasco reared its head again as the makers of a virus that exploited the technology were arrested; we wondered why there was so little honesty in the net neutrality debate, and how Senators who voted against net neutrality could be in favor of the broadcast flag; and we looked at just how little impact the Grokster decision had on the world of file sharing.

Hide this

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


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread



Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.