This Week In Techdirt History: January 30th - February 5th

from the that-was-that dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the six-strike copyright "voluntary agreement" officially died. Another prominent death was Denuvo DRM for Reisdent Evil 7, which was cracked in five days, which the company hoped was better than nothing. In a more worrying DRM development, the eventually-successful push to codify EME DRM in the HTML5 standard lurched forward. Meanwhile, Congress appeared to be preparing to gut net neutrality and AT&T was downright giddy about Ajit Pai, while we took a moment for a deeper look at the horrors of a Trump presidency.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, in the aftermath of the SOPA protests, it was time for reflection on what happened and attempts to channel the energy into other issues — unless of course you were a SOPA supporter, in which case it was time for misleading op-eds and general whining. Protests against ACTA were spreading and starting to get big results, while Hollywood was partying with TPP negotiators. Megaupload users were planning to sue over the shutdown of the site, while ICE seized 300 more sites, mostly to protect the Super Bowl.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, Sony BMG admitted that its rootkit violated federal law and agreed to pay to fix damaged computers, Google issued a non-apology over its decision to censor results in China, and YouTube started talking about revenue sharing plans (while Viacom was pulling over 100,000 clips from the site). We looked at the deeper implications of Google's book scanning fight, and the emerging norm of judges citing Wikipedia. Also, this was the week of the (in)famous Adult Swim marketing stunt that shut down the city of Boston due to massive paranoid overreaction.

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Filed Under: history, look back