This Week In Techdirt History: September 15th - 21st

from the then-and-then-and-then dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, new revelations about New Zealand's mass surveillance garnered an angry response from the Prime Minister, who then tried to disprove the claims with declassified documents that did not in fact address them. Soon, a former New Zealand official came forward with his own story of being told to "bury" unflattering documents. Meanwhile, the CIA's John Brennan was refusing to tell the Senate who okayed spying on senators, we learned more about Yahoo's legal battle with the NSA, and the UK's GCHQ was facing another lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, we looked at a variety of questions about IP law, like why we let juries set patent award damages when they keep getting overturned by appeals courts, is copyright compatible with privacy, and why do content creators get control over derivative works? Charlie Brooker delivered a scathing rant against Damien Hirst for his legal action against one such derivative-work creator, and tied it into the issue of file sharing — since UK recording artists were speaking out against the idea of kicking file sharers off the internet, which was really irritating industry insiders and leading them to simply pretend it wasn't happening. Amidst all this emerged the beginning of what would turn out to be a bit of an ongoing spat between Techdirt and Lily Allen.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the war against all sorts of abuses of the growing internet was still raging in weird ways: Symantic was trying a new system to fight phishing, the anti-spam industry was a still-growing patent thicket, China was claiming it would help fight spam, and nobody liked California's anti-spyware bill — perhaps because it didn't make sense to attempt a legal definition of spyware. Meanwhile, Nokia and other mobile companies were working on mobile file-sharing systems which, as one might imagine, had entertainment industry folks and wireless carriers kind of freaking out.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 8th - 14th

from the stifled dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, popular websites across the web participated in Internet Slowdown Day to demand net neutrality from the FCC — driving 1,000 calls per minute to Congress at some points, for a total of 300,000 calls plus 2-million emails and 700,000 FCC comments. It also spurred the big cable companies to waste their money on ads misleadingly pretending to support net neutrality themselves.

Also this week in 2014, a court ruling gave a big win for fair use and against "hot news", one cab company was extra-angry about Uber and labeled it a cyber-terrorist group, and newly released memos justifying warrantless wiretapping showed crazy levels of executive branch authority.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, Hollywood was continuing its zealous war against Redbox by fearmongering about kids renting R-rated movies, the recording industry in Japan was working with the government on a plan to disable phones that are used to listen to pirated music, yet another DVD release of a classic TV show had to replace its music with new generic stuff due to licensing headaches, some ridiculous exaggeration was exposed in the UK's oft-repeated figure of 7-million file sharers, we got a look at the RIAA's copyright propaganda for schools, and there was yet another attempt to turn content into physical property with universal DRM. After all this, it was nice to read a judge eloquently explaining why copyright is not property... all the way back in 1773.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the war against spam continued as WiFi spammers got caught and a major spam ISP finally kicked off 148 spammers — but so did the counterattacks, with a lawsuit against the spam blacklist headed to court and everyone bracing for the incoming deluge of election spam, though there was hope that might not be as bad as expected. One strategy that definitely didn't make sense was combating spam by turning email into a walled garden.

Meanwhile, a university was trying to ban independent wifi networks with questionable authority, congress was moving forward with a draconian plan to criminalize file-sharing, and we saw the terrible appeals court ruling in Bridgeport v. Dimension that eliminated the de minimis defense for music sampling (even when the sample is completely unrecognizable) and issued the absurd edict "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 1st - 7th

from the back-then dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, police in the UK were threatening domain registrars and abusing anti-terror laws to snoop on journalists (while keeping mum about just how often they do so), while the Culture Secretary was demanding that search engines magically stop piracy. Artist deadmau5 was embroiled in two crazy IP battles — one in which Ferarri was trying to block the sale of his decorated car, and another in which Disney was trying to block his attempt to trademark his logo (even as he discovered the company had been pirating his music). In Australia, a movie studio was comparing piracy to pedophilia and terrorism while ISPs were getting sued for wanting court orders before blocking websites. And the IFPI issued an especially bogus takedown notice demanding Kim Dotcom take his own album down from his own website.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, the Canadian recording industry was mobilizing in Toronto to push bad copyright ideas, the especially bad idea of a music tax was rearing its head yet again, Hollywood was making another attempt to start using selectable output control to block DVRs, and the UK IP Minister was defending kicking people off the internet. Both the new USPTO head and the Commerce Secretary were calling for more patents, approved faster — I guess like the insane one they granted saying that you can patent the idea of using precisely three knowledge bases to diagnose medical diagnostic decisions — while we got another example of the US's pressure on China to adopt a patent system turning around and biting it. But one of the worst ideas came from Microsoft's patent boss, who was calling for globalization of the patent system.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, outgoing MPAA boss Jack Valenti was continuing to misunderstand and misrepresent the digital word right up to the wire of retirement, while his incoming replacement Dan Glickman got off to a worrying start with a speech praising and defending Valenti's words and the export of the DMCA to Australia. Over at the RIAA, Mitch Glazier was still pushing the "sue everyone" angle, the INDUCE Act got a mostly-cosmetic update, and the downloadable music store market was still a mess. We did get one very important ruling though, with the Court of Appeals upholding the decision that it's not a DMCA violation to create third-party garage door openers, though the precedent it set was murky and not as clear-cut as one might have hoped.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 18th - 24th

from the yesterdays dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, all eyes were on the protests in Ferguson, Missouri where police were threatening and arresting reporters even after, it turned out, they signed a court agreement promising not to. It was a stark example of the broader problem of police militarization, a trend promoted by defense contractors thanks to which police in the suburbs sometimes have more powerful weapons than Marines in Afghanistan, and of course the routine use of tear gas which is a banned chemical weapon except for domestic use thanks to... an exception lobbied for by the US.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, we wondered if there could be any such thing as a fair trial about file sharing given the proliferation and normalization of biased language about "piracy" and "property". Courts were busy insanely slicing and dicing the Superman copyright, the IFPI was insisting that the Pirate Party shouldn't be allowed to hold the positions it does, music publishers were waging their war against lyrics websites, the Associated Press was still utterly failing to explain its plan to DRM the news, and we saw the kickoff of a new copyright maximalist push in the UK after Lord Peter Mandelson spent the weekend with David Geffen. We also took a look at a murky and possibly-apocryphal, but nevertheless interesting, story about what might have been the first-ever copyright trial in 6th century Ireland.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, after all the hype, the Google IPO... was delayed by the SEC. Then the company admitted it had been a bit overly optimistic by lowering the IPO range and cutting the number of shares, before finally actually going public and only hitting the bottom price of the reduced range.

Also this week in 2004: music labels were continuing to bet the farm on ringtones being more than a trend, Real was hoping its battle with Apple would spark some good customer responses but apparently forgot it still wasn't a super-popular company, and an appeals court upheld the all-important Grokster decision.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 11th - 17th

from the if-i-remember-correctly dept

Five Years Ago

The fight for government transparency continued this week in 2014, with a judge giving the DOJ until the end of the month to submit a declassified FISA court opinion explaining the justifications for Section 215, the exposure of regular fraud and abuse by patent examiners that the USPTO tried to hide from the Inspector General, and new revelations from Ed Snowden including the fact that Syria's 2012 internet outage was the result of an NSA hack gone wrong, and that the agency abused its internet metadata program just like every other program. But the biggest battle was for the CIA torture report, which the intelligence community began warning would "inflame anti-US passions" in the Middle East if it was released.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, there was an earlier story of USPTO misbehavior in the form of bilking people out of money. The Encyclopedia Britannica yet again lost in an attempt to abuse a patent that it claimed covered basic GPS functionality, one judge blocked sales of Microsoft Word over patent infringement (in a ruling that had no hope of sticking) while another banned Real from selling RealDVD (sadly not so simple), and yet another overturned the ruling that allowed DVD jukeboxes. While the DOJ was defending the $80,000/song award in the Jammie Thomas lawsuit, a poet who tried to sue Oprah Winfrey for the even-more-insane sum of a trillion dollars saw his lawsuit thrown out — while another author was trying a similar approach to cash in on the success of Twilight.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the number one culprit on the EFF's list of bogus patents was being wielded against universities and just about everyone else who streamed any kind of content online, while Microsoft was keeping the wheel turning with a newly granted patent on storing then automatically uploading data, and we talked about how innovation and IP hoarding don't mix. Meanwhile, Google was ramping up for its IPO (after giving some stock to Yahoo to settle outstanding legal disputes) and worrying its emails might be filtered as spam, while smaller investors tried to figure out if they could get in on the action and other companies quietly delayed their own IPOs to avoid getting lost in the Google hype.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 4th - 10th

from the back-in-the-day dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, while President Obama was defending the CIA's increasingly exposed use of torture on the basis that they had a "tough job", James Clapper was defending the redactions in the torture report and calling them "minimal" — but Senators were calling it "incomprehensible", because even 15% redaction can hide all the critical details.

Meanwhile, comic artist Randy Queen was giving a crash course in DMCA abuse, using takedowns to censor blogs that were critical of his work, then claiming that posts criticizing this were defamatory, then doubling down yet again by trying to DMCA the posts about his DMCA abuse.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, a Washington Post writer started an online journalism dust-up when he complained about Gawker "ripping off" his reporting with a blog post discussing and heavily linking to one of his articles. Other bloggers quickly pointed out that, in fact, the mainstream press "rips off" bloggers constantly, spurring more people to dig in and illustrate the entitlement mentality driving big media's complaints about blogs, and finally the suggestion that perhaps they should run their own blogs about their own reporting if they are so upset. Amidst this, the Associated Press was still digging in on their plan to DRM the news, with their text licensing calculator that would gladly charge you for any text whether it came from the AP or not, and ironically leveraging Creative Commons licensing language for their ill-fated DRM tech. We suggested the agency would be better off finding other services to offer newspapers, while competitor Reuters stepped up defended linking, excerpting and sharing.

Also this week in 2009, we published a long rebuttal to the RIAA's factually-challenged boasts about the Joel Tenenbaum verdict.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, long before Joel Tenenbaum, we were wondering why the RIAA gets to hold parents responsible for their kids' downloading. The US was using trade negotiations to export the DMCA and software patents to Australia, as it likes to do, Hollywood succeeded in driving a DVD backup software company out of business, and for no particular reason the FCC happily voted that VoIP systems should be required to have wiretap backdoors for law enforcement — a fitting week for Tim Wu to write a post exploring how different regulatory schemes create a "copyright gap" that impacts the telephony and content industries in vastly different ways. We also got an important appeals court ruling that found websites devoted to criticizing companies are not commercial speech and thus do not constitute trademark infringement.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 21st - 27th

from the that-was-that dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, traffic to The Pirate Bay was yet again surging following an attempt to block it. The copyright revolving door was in full swing, with the main architect of PIPA becoming an MPAA lobbyist alongside one of Hollywood's favorite former congressmen. Italy's public prosecutor seized a giant webmail provider and cloud storage provider for shaky copyright reasons, a San Francisco eviction lawyer was abusing the DMCA to censor a protest video, and a musician whose work was at the center of a copyright lawsuit against YouTube slammed the lawsuit and copyright itself.

Meanwihle, The Intercept revealed the US government's guidebook for putting people on the no-fly list, as well as the stunning extra scrutiny such people were then put under. And an ex-official from the State Department suggested that the NSA has even worse surveillance programs than the ones everyone was focused on.

Ten Years Ago

Sometimes there are shockingly perfect parallels between the present week and the past. Yesterday, we reported on Tulsi Gabbard's frankly insane lawsuit against Google — and this week in 2009, we reported on a gamer suing Sony with the same non-starter claim: that the company violated his First Amendment rights by banning him from a PS3 game. One might have hoped this sort of constitutional nonsense would stay relegated to random gamers, rather than being elevated to presidential candidates.

Also this week in 2009: LSU was fining students for filesharing while apparently deeply misunderstanding the RIAA's demands, copyright lobbyists and government officials were celebrating bogus piracy stats, BREIN was demanding the Pirate Bay itself start blocking Dutch ISPs, and the Associated Press announced its ill-fated plan to DRM the news.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, panic gripped the copyright maximalists of Europe in the face of a looming horror: some popular rock songs starting to enter the public domain. The research director for the BSA admitted that the group misleads the public with how it describes its statistics, by changing "retail value of pirated software" to "sales lost to piracy" — a massive change, but subtle to those who don't follow the subject closely. Nevertheless, Congress was pushing forward with the INDUCE act to fight piracy, holding hearings where the Copyright Office gave a full-throated endorsement of the bill and Orrin Hatch seemed not to notice that he basically admitted banning P2P systems is wrong. Congress was also pretty gung-ho on passing some sort of anti-spyware bill, details be damned. And this was also the week that Lindows became Linspire, after Microsoft gave up and just paid Michael Robertson a cool $20-million to buy the name.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 14th - 20th

from the what-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, new revelations from Edward Snowden painted a bad picture of the culture at the GCHQ while, in an interview, he also described the NSA practice of "routinely" passing around intercepted nude photos — something the agency quickly insisted it would stop if it knew about it. The NSA was also saying it had more emails from Snowden when he still worked for the agency, but would not release them.

Also this week in 2014: Google finally dumped its ill-fated real names policy, the MPAA was going after Popcorn Time, and the Supreme Court refused the Arthur Conan Doyle estate's last-gasp attempt to stop Sherlock Holmes from becoming public domain.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, we saw the ninth misguided lawsuit over trademark in Google AdWords, the Guinness Book of World Records used a bogus takedown to try to hide the records of a very embarrassing website fail, New Zealand was considering copyright reform but not really anything meaningful, and the newly-hugely-popular So You Think You Can Dance was blocked from doing a Michael Jackson tribute. A Norwegian ISP was fighting back against the Pirate Bay ban, the National Portrait Gallery was threatening Wikimedia over downloading public domain images, and Stephen Fry stepped up as an ally against corporate copyright abuse.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, the CEO of Streamcast was presenting evidence of collusion among record labels to blacklist file sharing companies, while a somewhat unclear study was suggesting BitTorrent usage was way up. The RIAA was predictably defending the INDUCE Act (which it basically wrote) in a letter full of misleading and untrue statements, while at the same time some people were asking if the agency's new anti-filesharing system Audible Magic was in violation of wiretapping laws, and its counterpart in Canada was fighting against a court ruling that said ISPs don't have to turn customer names over to the industry.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 7th - 13th

from the once-upon-a-time dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, an analysis of the Snowden leaks demonstrated that the NSA was clearly lying when it said he didn't have access to actual surveillance data, while the agency apologists were out in force. Then, a new release from the leak revealed that the FBI was directly spying on prominent Muslim-American politicians, garnering a weaselly non-denial from James Clapper. We also got a look at the FBI doing the bidding of the CIA, which sent agents after an employee over a FOIA request, while the wiretap report from the US Courts system revealed the surveillance nightmare of day-to-day drug enforcement, and the ACLU was digging into the militarization of police across the country.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, the RIAA was predictably trying to overstate the reach of its legal victory over Usenet.com, and also exaggerate the actions of Jammie Thomas as she sought a new trial. An appeals court punted on the chance to evaluate the constitutionality of the Copyright Royalty Board, while we got examples of the insanity of collection societies and anti-piracy groups around the world: the UK's FACT (a private organization) appeared to have seized and kept computers from a criminal investigation, people in Germany were beginning to talk about the huge problems with GEMA, ASCAP was trying to demand public performance licenses for embedding YouTube videos, Sweden's STIM was trying to charge companies that play music for employees, and SIIA's quasi-ironic resurrection of the Don't Coppy That Floppy campaign was based around a big lie about criminality.

Fifteen Years Ago

Something the RIAA wasn't shouting loudly about in 2004 was CD sales — because they were on the rise and that didn't fit with the sky-is-falling narrative about piracy. This was happening amidst the ongoing fragmentation nightmare in the world of music download stores, and while the BSA and MPAA were both out in force spreading flimsy numbers about piracy to be mindlessly parroted by reporters. The latter had also come up with a new insane plan for DVD screeners in award seasons: lock them to a single special DVD player that is also sent out to the judges.

Also this week in 2004: people were realizing that Gmail was a solid proof-of-concept for the viability of web applications, Yahoo was noticing this itself and purchased Oddpost for its email interface (which would become the new Yahoo Mail), and Nintendo's persistence in going-its-own-way failed when it led Satoru Iwata to believe customers don't want online games.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: June 30th - July 6th

from the as-i-recall dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, it was slightly refreshing to see the new NSA boss refrain from Keith Alexander's sky-is-falling hyperbole when talking about the fallout of the Snowden revelations. We continued to learn more about already-published documents — such as the fact that the FBI and CIA were joining the NSA in the use of "backdoor searches" — as well as getting new revelations, such as details on how the FISA Court (which incidentally also this week issued a memorandum letting bulk metadata collection continue, had given the NSA incredibly broad powers to spy on almost any country. The EFF was launching a new lawsuit against the agency too, this time over its procedures for dealing with zero-day vulnerabilities, and over in the other major arena of federal government secrecy, a court ordered the DOJ to release the other secret drone strike memo it had referenced in documents the previous week.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Aereo's shutdown, the CEO of CBS was twisting reality to call the ruling "pro-consumer", and we noted how the uncertainty it created may have killed the all-important Cablevision ruling about remote DVRs, but it was impossible to be sure.

Ten Years Ago

Speaking of the Cablevision ruling, it was this week in 2009 that the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and left the appeals court ruling in place. We were just beginning to get our heads around the scope of automated copyright settlement letter shakedowns, as well as the ridiculous copyright situation faced by academics who want to share their work. Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all sued for making a misstep in the music copyright maze, the RIAA scored an easy and expected legal win against Usenet.com while Jammie Thomas officially appealed the constitutionality of the award in her case, and L'Oreal was continuing its crusade to hold eBay responsible for its users' actions. This was also the week that a district court infamously blocked publication of an unofficial sequel to Catcher In The Rye, reminding us that copyright is one area where the government doesn't blink about banning books.

Fifteen Years Ago

Even all the way back in 2004, it was barely news to discover that lots of big companies routinely share customer data without permission or even disclosure. It was perhaps even less surprising to learn that people were opposed to the RIAA suing downloaders, or that CAN SPAM was still a failure at stopping spam (especially with 20% of Americans admitting they'd bought stuff from spam). Also not especially surprising was the latest failure of broadband-over-power-lines or, sadly, the Senate passing yet another slavishly pro-Hollywood bill easily via voice vote. But, though still not exactly "surprising", it was encouraging and inspiring to see the EFF kick into high-gear with its bad-patent-busting efforts that continue to this day.

Filed Under: history, look back