This Week In Techdirt History: October 3rd - 9th
from the back-in-the-day dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2016, the Trump's campaign was reacting to the leaked pages of his 1995 tax returns by threatening to sue the New York Times, and also reacting to some ads from the Clinton campaign by threatening to sue them, too — while at the same time, the campaign was facing its own bogus threat from the Phoenix Police over imagery of cops in an ad. The big story, though, was the revelation that Yahoo had secretly built email scanning software under pressure from the feds. This led to basically every other tech company rapidly denying that they'd done the same, followed by Yahoo itself issuing a tone-deaf non-denial denial of the report. The media was very confused about the story, with the New York Times and Reuters claiming totally different explanations for the email scanning, and over the course of the week even more disagreements and confusion arose.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2011, countries around the world were signing ACTA and finally admitting that it meant they'd have to change their copyright laws, while Brazil was drafting its own anti-ACTA framework for the internet. The Supreme Court declined to consider an appeals court ruling that properly stated music downloads are not public performances, though this didn't mean (as some claimed) that downloading had been legalized. Meanwhile, another judge dismissed a lawsuit over streaming video, but mostly avoided the larger copyright questions, and we saw a set of good rulings against copyright trolls, and one bad one.
This was also the week that Steve Jobs died at age 56.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2006, Facebook was getting a start on its soon-to-be-tradition of threatening people who make useful third-party tools. Amazon was abandoning its attempt to make an early version of something like Street View, and Wal-Mart was abandoning its much more stupid attempt to offer a MySpace clone. The fight between Belgian news publishers and Google was continuing, while the copyright fight over My Sharona was dragging in Yahoo, Amazon and Apple. And the big news — though it was still just a rumor with lots of conflicting information going around, making it hard to tell if it was true — was that Google was planning to buy YouTube for $1.6-billion.
