This Week In Techdirt History: July 9th - 15th

from the years-gone-by dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, we saw the folks who had recently been defeated by the internet try to sneakily get their way. In Europe, that took the form of resurrecting the all-but-dead ACTA inside the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (and writing clueless columns, of course). In the US, it was Lamar Smith trying to sneak SOPA through in bits and pieces in other bills, seemingly having learned nothing from the experience. The public wasn't oblivious though, and soon a backlash led to some of the problems of CETA being fixed and Smith's new bill falling apart.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, webcasters lost their fight to delay a big royalty hike when the court denied the requested stay, but then SoundExchange surprised us all by actually being just a little bit decent and holding off on actually enforcing the royalties. Sony BMG tried to redirect some of the blame for its rootkit fiasco by suing a company that supplied one of the pieces of copy protection software, while the silly DRM game of AACS was serving only to annoy legitimate customers. And surprise, surprise: a study found ripped DVDs weren't even a big source of piracy compared to file sharing.

Fifteen Years Ago

The battle over webcasting had already begun five years earlier in 2002, when it was clear that the labels wanted internet radio stations to go away. Meanwhile, after much concern about various pieces of bad internet legislation, it looked like Congress wasn't going to be moving on any of it anytime soon — but that didn't mean we could ignore a new bad bill that would basically eliminate people's fair use rights, which was unsurprising at a time when it looked like only one person in all of Congress really understood or cared about user rights.

Also this week in 2002, in a move that would further cement them both as tentpole internet platforms for years to come, eBay bought PayPal.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 2nd - 8th

from the stuff-that-happened dept

Five Years Ago

Charles Carreon kicked off this week in 2012 by continuing to dig deeper, while Matt Inman and IndieGogo hit back. He then tried to intimidate a parodist with a bizarre list of threats and a DMCA takedown. But by Tuesday, he had dismissed his lawsuit (while still claiming victory somehow), only for things to take a truly bizarre turn when an apparently fake lawsuit was filed against him under Inman's name.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, Russia shut down Allofmp3, a new legal spat raised the question of whether embedding a YouTube video can be infringement, and restaurants were beginning to really grapple with independent, amateur reviewers. The MPAA and RIAA were still up to their dirty investigative tricks while the NFL was trying to dictate the contours of fair use. And this was the week that Bill Gates ceased to be the richest man in the world.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, the RIAA was just starting up its campaign of going after the individual users of P2P sharing networks, while webcasters were being driven underground by onerous new royalty rates and a Danish court deeming it illegal to deep-link to a newspaper website. As WiFi continued to ascend, ISPs like Time Warner were starting to crack down on open hotspots — and as text messaging continued to ascend, the Methodist Church was joining the early crowd of people decrying it for getting in the way of social interaction.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: June 25th - July 1st

from the blogging-through-the-ages dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, we saw some obstinate reactions to the ACTA protests, with an EU Parliamentarian saying dissent was "a soft form of terrorism", and the EU Commissioner saying he would simply ignore rejection of ACTA by the EU Parliament — while Australia's parliamentary committee on the subject was recommending rejection. As for the TPP in the US, we were annoyed but unsurprised to learn that the MPAA had full online access to the text of the agreement even as Congress continued to struggle to get even the slightest glimpse. Rep. Darrell Issa made the reasonable request that he be allowed to observe the next round of TPP negotiations, but he was (again unsurprisingly) rejected.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, some people were beginning to ask whether the RIAA's piracy investigation tactics were even legal. Of course, Attorney General Albert Gonzales was far more interested in throwing people in jail for attempted piracy. Rolling Stone rolled its eyes and wrote an obituary for the recording industry, while the MPAA was off doing its own thing — suing sites for just linking to infringing content. Meanwhile, statistics about reality kept being disobedient to the world of anti-violent-videogame crusaders, with their protests driving up the hype around Manhunt 2, and violent crime rates continuing to fall while violent video games got more popular.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, the new era of the web was slowly being born as the world noticed that broadband internet access unlocked entirely new usage patterns and behaviors for internet users — even though broadband was still really struggling to catch on in the US. Meanwhile, a congressman introduced a bill to legitimize all sorts of nasty anti-piracy vigilante tactics including the increasingly popular music industry scheme of trying to swamp file trading networks with fake files. Newspaper executives were looking to the future of the mobile web, while newspaper columnists were stuck in the past and moaning about those newfangled "blogs". And the RIAA succeeded in scaring workplaces into cracking down on employees sharing MP3s.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the how-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

The Charles Carreon saga continued this week in 2012, with a lawsuit against Matthew Inman and the charities he was raising money for. When the full details of the suit became public, so did all sorts of nuttiness contained therein. Inman came to the table with an open letter, telling Carreon to take some time off and cool down — but he didn't listen, and promised to subpoena Twitter and Ars Technica over a parody account mocking him. Finally, at the very end of the week, he admitted the initial lawsuit was a mistake — but kept on digging anyway with new bizarre theories and attacks.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, NBC was on a copyright warpath, trying to get the FCC to force ISPs to monitor traffic for infringement, and trotting out the now famously hilarious attempt to blame movie piracy for hurting corn farmers. Viacom was still going full-force against YouTube and bulldozing over fair use in the process, even as YouTube (which played a big role in ending P2P's dominance of web traffic) was unveiling its video editing tool to encourage more user-generated content. And EMI was oh-so-shockingly discovering that people responded positively to the sale of DRM-free music.

Fifteen Years Ago

There are a variety of reactions I often have to these stories from these early days of Techdirt. Sometimes they include amusingly incorrect predictions or shockingly precise ones; sometimes it's simply intriguing to see the small beginnings of something that would later become a big deal. This week in 2002, there was one post that fell into that latter category in a particularly striking way that makes it very funny to read now in all its early innocence, and so I think it's worth reposting in full. In the days when the web was still fresh, before some of the bigger cyberwar panics, and long before today's perplexing geopolitical landscape, there was this small post entitled Can't Hack The Kremlin:

Apparently, since the new website of Russian President Vladimir Putin went online about 24 hours ago, more than 100 hackers have tried to break in. Putin is "excited" that the Kremlin's techies have been able to block all the hack attacks. Does anyone else think this is just begging for more hackers to hit the site until someone finds a way in? It seems odd to promote how proud you are that no one broke in after just one day.

And the rest is, as they say, history. And also current events.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the a-saga-begins dept

Five Years Ago

It was this week in 2012 that The Oatmeal wrote a level-headed criticism of FunnyJunk and received, in return, a somewhat scattershot threat of a defamation lawsuit. As a result, a whole lot of internet attention and ire was turned on one man, whose name we'd become very familiar with: Charles Carreon, who dug in his heels and tried to shut down The Oatmeal's fundraiser. Then he lashed out and accused Matt Inman of "instigating security attacks", and then swore he'd find some legal avenue by which to go after Inman. The saga, as you know, will continue in future weeks...

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, media companies continued to pile on to YouTube with money-grab lawsuits. Sports leagues were actively fighting to claim ownership of facts about games, with the NCAA ejecting a reporter for live-blogging and Major League Baseball taking its legal fight over fantasy leagues to the appeals court. The MPAA and RIAA teamed up to create yet another lobbying group hot on the heels of the new Copyright Alliance, AT&T decided to start filtering infringing content for Hollywood, and a worrying court ruling ordered TorrentSpy to collect and hand over additional data on its users.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, in an act that practically defined "too little, too late", Sony and Universal announced plans to cut prices on digital music downloads. The BSA was beating its usual drum about the dangers of software piracy, the government was floundering when it came to internal use of technology, and the geeks in Silicon Valley were continuing to get more political. It was also this week that the late, great David Bowie shared some of his refreshingly forward-looking thoughts on copyright in the digital age, saying "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing." Almost everything he said about the nature of the coming change was correct, but he underestimated the power, tenacity and deep pockets of those who continue to fight tooth and nail against it.

Ninety-Seven Years Ago

Most cliches exist for a reason — though tired, they are apt. It's easy to forget they had to come from somewhere, and fun to find out where that was. And so this week we celebrate the birth of a common political cliche: the "smoke-filled room" where big decisions are made by powerful people. It was on June 11th, 1920 that Raymond Clapper of the United Press first used the term to describe the nomination process for Warren G. Harding at the Republican National Convention, presumably not knowing it would enter the lexicon as a go-to shorthand.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the recollections dept

Five Years Ago

Early this week in 2012, as the world continued to get its head around the recently-leaked details of the Stuxnet worm, we wondered why the usually-leak-averse White House didn't seem to be hassling anyone over these huge revelations, leading us to ask whether Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning would face the same charges if he had shared info with the New York Times instead of Wikileaks. Of course, by the end of the week, the winds seemed to be turning a little bit, with reports of an FBI investigation and calls for a hearing from Sen. Feinstein.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, Google was struggling to make publishers realize that its book search could be their friend by helping them make co-branded versions of the search for their own websites. Publishers, meanwhile, were pulling absurd stunts like stealing Google laptops at trade shows in order to air their misguided displeasure. Up here in Canada, following extensive and bizarre shaming from the industry over an apparent movie camcording problem, politicians introduced a new anti-camdording bill. And as the world awaited the approaching and much-hyped release of the iPhone, a number of other devices started getting labelled (both correctly and incorrectly) as competitors.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, the Church of Scientology was locked in a battle with Google over search results, the BSA teamed up with Egypt to issue a Fatwa on piracy, and Microsoft told Hollywood to get over itself and put content online. The buzz around newfangled "blogs" reached a fever pitch (and this is, I think, the first week where we started solely referring to them as blogs and never mentioning "weblogs") so of course one big question was: can you make money with them? Another big question was whether or not they count as "journalism", and apparently Berkeley's opinion was yes.

Sixty-Eight Years Ago

Comparisons to George Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-Four are not exactly uncommon in today's political and social climate, and while I personally remember finding its senior counterpart Brave New World to be the more resonant and insightful dystopia (it's been a while since I've read either), it seems worth noting that it was on June 8th, 1949 that Orwell's masterpiece was first published.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 28th - June 3rd

from the happy-birthday-to-you,-copyright-(I-can-sing-that-now,-right?) dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, Google's recently-unveiled tool for looking at DMCA takedown requests was revealing just how unbelievably stupid and bogus those requests so frequently are — but the RIAA was doing its best to blame its own failure to use the tools properly on Google, of course. Meanwhile, the government hit some speedbumps in its pursuit of Kim Dotcom when the New Zealand judge refused to rubber-stamp the extradition order, and the filings with the district court in the US revealed massive flaws in the government's case. Also, it was this week in 2012 that the New York Times revealed the extensive and fascinating details of the Stuxnet worm, confirming that it was a US-led project in conjunction with Israel.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the world was still trying to get its head around YouTube and the explosion of user-generated content. For some that meant pointing out how some of it sucks as if that means anything. For others (like governments around the world) that sometimes meant banning YouTube all together, or just trying to cleverly restrict user-generated content via "free trade" agreements. In Venezuela, however, YouTube became the new refuge for a traditional TV station that was shut down by the government.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, in the much earlier days of the DMCA, the EFF released a report detailing all the negative fallout of the anti-circumvention provisions for free speech, fair use, and innovation. Governments were struggling to figure out how national laws work on a borderless web, and Silicon Valley was realizing the necessity of dipping its toe into the Washington lobbying game. Meanwhile, Blockbuster was scrambling to go head-to-head with Netflix (and I think we all know how that worked out), online banking seemed to be finally taking off in the US (though that may have just been anecdotal), and the music industry was still not listening to the many people telling it what a big mistake it was making by shutting down Napster.

Two-Hundred And Twenty-Seven Years Ago

We recently noted the 1710 passage of the Statute of Anne, the original prototype copyright law — and this week we mark the formal beginning of the copyright saga in the US. It was on May 31st, 1790 that George Washington signed the Copyright Act into law. At the time, the Act was only half a page long, and applied only to books, maps, and charts — though musical compositions were routinely registered as books.

Filed Under: history, look back

Erasing History: Trump Administration Returning CIA Torture Report To Be Destroyed

from the awful dept

Over the last few months, a battle has played out over what will happen to the 6,700 page "CIA Torture Report" that the Senate Intelligence Committee spent many years and approximately $40 million producing. The report apparently reveals all sorts of terrible details about how the CIA tortured people for little benefit (and great harm in other ways) and lied to Congress about it. While a heavily redacted executive summary was released, there is apparently significantly more in the full report. And if we, as a country, are to actually come to terms with what our nation did, this report should be made public and there should be a public discussion on our past failings.

Instead, it looks like the report is going to be returned and destroyed. Senator Richard Burr has been against the report from the beginning, and ever since he took over the Senate Intelligence Committee he's demanded that the administration return the report, arguing (totally against all evidence) that it was a work product of the Senate Intelligence Committee not meant for distribution to the executive branch. Of course, that's the exact opposite of what Senator Dianne Feinstein -- who spearheaded the effort to create the report -- has said. The intention was to understand what the CIA did and make sure the same mistakes were not repeated. And, in fact, Feinstein asked the executive branch agencies to put the document into their own records -- which would make the report subject to a FOIA request.

The previous administration did not give the report back to Burr, but did block those in the executive branch from reading it or from putting it into their records -- which has so far stymied FOIA requests. And now, the Trump administration has started returning the report to Burr to destroy:

The Trump administration has begun returning copies of a voluminous 2014 Senate report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program to Congress, complying with the demand of a top Republican senator who has criticized the report for being shoddy and excessively critical of the C.I.A.

The Trump administration’s move, described by multiple congressional officials, raises the possibility that copies of the 6,700-page report could be locked in Senate vaults for good — exempt from laws requiring that government records eventually become public. The C.I.A., the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the C.I.A.’s inspector general have returned their copies of the report, the officials said.

This is problematic on many, many levels. Feinstein had even asked Obama to declassify the report, before leaving office -- something he refused to do. Feinstein is not at all happy about this turn of events.

“I’m concerned and disappointed that Chairman Burr demanded the return of copies of the classified edition of the torture report. The fact that he would take this divisive action without notifying or consulting with the Democrats on the committee is a departure from the bipartisan nature of this committee. It’s particularly troubling he would take this divisive action while the committee is conducting its Russian investigation.

“The committee voted in March 2009 to initiate a report on harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA on detainees during the Bush administration. After almost four years of hard work, the committee approved the report in December 2012. The CIA was afforded the opportunity to respond and where appropriate, changes were made and the CIA’s responses were included in the footnotes. The committee then voted to declassify and release the executive summary and the findings and conclusions in December 2014.

“Chairman Burr’s assertion that he, today, has authority over a final Senate report completed prior to him assuming the chairmanship is both alarming and concerning. This creates a dangerous precedent that a current chairman could question acts of previous congresses and countless historical reports and records and essentially nullify reports produced by a prior congress under a different chairman.

“No senator—chairman or not—has the authority to erase history. I believe that is the intent of the chairman in this case.

“I’m profoundly disappointed that CIA Director Pompeo would approve this action. Members, including myself, carefully questioned him during his confirmation process about his views on torture. He clearly stated his opposition to torture and made a commitment to read the full classified report. I very much doubt that he has had an opportunity to fulfill that commitment.

“The report is an important tool to help educate our intelligence agencies about a dark chapter of our nation’s history. Without copies of it, the lessons we’ve learned will be forgotten. The intelligence agencies have a moral, if not legal, obligation to retain every copy of this report for posterity.”

Senator Ron Wyden put out an even stronger statement:

“Attempts to erase history are the tactics of the insecure and the power hungry and have no place in a democracy. The torture report is a historical record that belongs to all Americans,” Wyden said. “This unprecedented move by Chairman Burr and the Trump administration could serve only one purpose -- to pave the way for the kind of falsehoods used to justify an illegal and dangerous torture program. For the sake of future generations of Americans, this report should be immediately returned to the government agencies who gave it up, disseminated widely within the government and most importantly, declassified for the American people.”

Assuming Burr gets back his copies and does, in fact, destroy them, there are still two possible other copies out there. The Trump administration (unlike the Obama administration) did, in fact, give a copy to the courts as was ordered by the judge in a case about the torture program. The other copy was apparently "preserved" in the Obama archives, where it will be kept for 12 years before it might be declassified. At this point that copy is, perhaps, the only chance that this detailed report won't be completely deleted from history.

Of course, the other possibility... is that someone along the way who had access to the report has kept a copy of it and decides to leak the report to the press. This would be doing a true service to history and help preventing future shameful episodes involving torture. Hopefully someone out there with access to the report -- and a conscience -- does the right thing.

Filed Under: cia, dianne feinstetin, donald trump, history, richard burr, ron wyden, torture report

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

from the how-many-roads dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, the jury in the Oracle/Google patent trial ruled that there was no infringement, while Judge Alsup revealed his coding knowledge on the copyright side. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was saying they should stop calling infringement "theft" despite the MPAA's own website doing exactly that many times, Congress proposed giving ICE another ten million dollars to fight intellectual property infringement, and TV networks were suing DISH with the insane argument that skipping commercials is copyright infringement. Meanwhile, five years before its recent successful reusable rocket tests, SpaceX was making its first successful cargo run to the ISS, marking a significant milestone in private space travel.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the proprietary video services launched by various companies were continuing to struggle and die off, with CNN dropping its paid online video service while Time Warner struggled with its own, and Budweiser got ready to kill the ill-fated Bud.TV. The RIAA was trying to close the "radio loophole" by convincing Congress to force radio stations to pay royalties for playing music (leading some to notice that the industry was similarly worried about the "jukebox loophole" nearly half a century earlier), even while it was carefully backing down on new webcasting royalty rates that would have killed smaller webcasters.

Fifteen Years Ago

The webcasting battle was not new — five years earlier this week in 2007, an equally disastrous attempt to enact webcasting royalties fell through. Meanwhile, a virus that aimed to stop the trading of infringing material was spreading on the Kazaa network, Hollywood was trying to get copy protection built into all analog-to-digital converters, and you could cut the tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood with a knife. Google launched its now-defunct Labs page, authoritarian regimes were wielding the power of the internet in frightening new ways, and the still-DVD-based Netflix went public, joining the ranks of stocks-you-really-wish-you'd-bought.

One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years Ago

They've done good reporting and bad, they've struggled to adapt to the digital world, and we've often criticized them here on Techdirt — but nevertheless the Associated Press is an old and proud fixture of the journalistic world, and it was on May 22nd, 1846 that it was founded by five New York City dailies to share the cost of covering the Mexican-American War.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the the-more-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, a Microsoft-funded effort to disrupt BitTorrent was drawing scrutiny, EMI was gloating over the demise of MP3Tunes, and the MPAA was cheering on legal rulings against the Pirate Bay. Of course, one of those rulings was called into question when a Dutch judge's connections to anti-piracy groups drew accusations of corruption, and one of TPB's founders was taking the legal fight over a Swedish ruling to the EU courts. Meanwhile, protestors against the TPP were getting creative, Chile was threatening to drop out of the negotiations all together, Rep. Darrell Issa posted an old leaked version of the agreement for discussion, and the USTR was still attempting to claim that listening to people counts as "transparency".

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, while the MPAA was making some curious changes to its opaque and esoteric ratings system, the RIAA was getting journalists to parrot its propaganda about its copyright shakedowns, and Microsoft was spreading unoriginal FUD about Linux infringing on its patents (prompting Sun to remind it that real companies don't litigate, they innovate). Cinemas were lashing out at the idea of getting rid of movie release windows, CBS was learning why trying to build its own online video destination was a bad idea, and the latest update to AACS was cracked before it even hit the market. We also witnessed the birth of The Copyright Alliance at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Viacom and more.

Fifteen Years Ago

Sometimes — such as this week in 2002 — cracking CD protection was as easy as using a black marker or some electrical tape. Then again, other times the CD might lock up your iMac and force you to take it in for repairs. While the copyright world was discussing big, sweeping ideas like blanked licensing fees paid to ISPs and compulsory licenses for music downloads, the recently-announced Creative Commons was launching in earnest.

Also, you know that oft-mentioned fact about how everyone from Europe is descended from Charlemagne as a matter of mathematical inevitability? It was this week in 2002 that those numbers were first crunched.

One-Hundred And Fifteen Years Ago

Most of you are probably at least vaguely familiar with the Antikythera mechanism, an shockingly advanced astronomical calculator/analog computer from Ancient Greece. It was on May 17th, 1902 that the mechanism was discovered by an archaeologist examining the remnants of a ship, itself discovered on the sea floor two years earlier by sponge divers.

Filed Under: history, look back