This Week In Techdirt History: July 26th - August 1st

from the happy-birthday-FBI-and-CIA! dept

Five Years Ago

The last few weeks have been full of copyright ridiculousness, but this week in 2010 features a lot of exploration into copyright's nuances. First, the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress finally outlined DMCA exemptions for jailbreaking smartphones and some other situations, while rejecting some other proposed exceptions — and sparking Canada to take a fresh look at its own anti-circumvention proposals, essentially admitting it lets the US heavily influence Canadian copyright law. One US court started to put some limitations on the anti-circumvention clause itself by suggesting that simply using circumvention software is not itself a violation; the British High Court ruled that emulating a piece of software is not infringement; and another ruling let venues deduct from their BMI license deals when they directly license music. This was also hot on the heels of ASCAP's boss refusing Larry Lessig's invitation to debate, and bizarrely claiming that said invitation was an attempt to "silence" ASCAP.

A bunch of other interesting questions arose in the form of copyright concerns over Flipbook, the sale of prints made from long-lost (but recently found) Ansel Adams negatives, attempts to assert new copyrights on work by an artist who had been dead for 71 years, and the highly problematic proposal of a new digital transmission right. Meanwhile, the British Library was concerned about copyright hindering research, and gamers everywhere were worrying about copyright stymying the preservation of video game history.

Ten Years Ago

We got a bunch of wonderful tech-panics this week in 2005. Perhaps most notable was the head of the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force declaring that "cantenna" wi-fi extenders are nefarious and illegal and getting the news media to swallow it. We also saw a panic over "pod slurping" (an unnecessarily specific version of data-theft-by-trespassing), and a seemingly random trio of senators got extremely concerned about porn on file-sharing networks while we awaited a mysterious new anti-porn bill informed by obsolete data. One lawyer in the US was moving on from his freakouts about Grand Theft Auto and unveiling brand new freakouts about The Sims, while Australia was outdoing the US on the former by effectively banning GTA altogether. Beatles producer George Martin was complaining about how easy it is for people to record music these days, and Techdirt itself became the target of a very tiny and personal tech-freakout: one unknown AOL user who was convinced we were spamming him (and apparently unable to find the unsubscribe button in every one of our double-opt-in newsletters). At least it didn't go down the way things do in Russia, where a notorious spammer was found brutally murdered.

Also, long before the world reeled at Pluto's loss of planet status (something I believe is now back up for debate?), astronomers were pointing to a tenth planet even further out.

Fifteen Years Ago

Napster's fate was in a serious state of flux this week in 2000. First, a judge ordered an injunction, shutting it down; the pundits piled on, taking a wide variety of views on this development (some much smarter than others); but, by the end of the week, Napster was granted a stay on the injunction and kept things running; cue an unbelievable volume of discussion from all corners of the internet, with some realizing that the RIAA's war on Napster, even if ultimately "successful", was a perfect example of utterly failed strategic thinking.

As you follow Techdirt's posts right around this time, you'll notice something that we started to notice ourselves: intellectual property was becoming our most popular topic and a tentpole of the blog (even though today it's hard to imagine that ever wasn't the case!)

This week in 2000 we also saw early glimmers of major technological trends, like the fact that the video-game industry would become a massive entertainment sector rivalling Hollywood. But we also saw lots of tech that was just slightly ahead of its time: wireless was heavily hyped and clearly going to matter some day, but lots of key factors were holding back adoption, especially in the US and especially when it came to things like wireless banking. Some tech was clearly moving forward — such as input methods for handheld devices (which were still pretty dismal back then) — while other areas were a bit more stubborn: newspapers didn't seem to be dying nearly as fast as predicted, and 83% of people in the UK said they'd never switch to the internet for news.

107 & 68 Years Ago

July 26th is a double-whammy in the history of America's federal landscape in the areas of law enforcement, security, espionage and more. First, in 1908, it was the day that The Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI) was formed. Then, thirty-nine years later, it marks the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, which established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, and laid the groundwork for the Department of Defense.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 19th - 25th

from the a-type-of-type dept

Five Years Ago

The copyright world was still full of activity this week in 2010. A bizarre lawsuit against Scribd, claiming the company's copyright filters were themselves infringing, was dropped; a Dutch court ruled (again) that the Pirate Bay must block Dutch users, while the Swedish Pirate Party launched the Pirate ISP; US Copyright Group filed more lawsuits in its copyright shakedown campaign, while more porn companies were getting in on the same game and Perfect 10 was trying its own brand of copyright insanity in Canada and RightHaven was ramping up its own now-infamous trolling. The entertainment industry was still trying (and failing) to make DRM not suck, the BSA was using totally made-up stats to try to change African copyright laws, Homeland Security was still aggressively conflating copyright infringement with counterfeiting, and IP Czar Victoria Espinel was playing the "blame China" card.

On the flipside, Deutsche Bank was suggesting it's time to rethink copyright and the Telegraph in the UK was suggesting record labels should give all their music away as free MP3s. RapidShare was vindicated by a German court, while an appeals court in the US was explaining to some documentary filmmakers that you can't copyright facts. And since it's admittedly fun to see copyright abuse fail, we got two entertaining stories when the designer leading the charge for fashion copyright was caught copying designs, and a Canadian copyright lawsuit seeking $27-million in damages ended with an award of $500.

There was a big non-copyright victory too: the Senate passed its bill against "libel tourism", moving towards protecting Americans from a particularly pernicious infringement on their free speech.

Ten Years Ago

Five years before that, this week in 2005 we met the first US piracy czar. Ringtone sellers were freaking out about online "shoplifters" while a fear of piracy was preventing the creation of Harry Potter e-books (and spurring the creation of homebrew versions). The Associated Press was happily misrepresenting BitTorrent while the RIAA and MPAA were trying to get California schools to do their dirty work. Up in Canada, the National Gallery was demonstrating that it did not understand the public domain, while film festival organizers in Edinburgh were adopting Hollywood-style bans on mobile phones. The stupidity and inefficacy of all these things was unimportant: the entertainment industry just believes what it wants to believe.

Apparently in 2005, you could still take a stance against mobile phones as a whole, on the basis that they could be used as terrorism tools — though a quick look at how much teens and young adults loved their phones should have put that to bed as a realistic position. Of course, far more popular was concern over violence and sex in video games, the hype of which led Grand Theft Auto to get bumped up from an M rating to "Adults Only".

Fifteen Years Ago

Silicon Valley was still in a state of flux this week in 2000. People noted that VCs were hit by the dot-com bubble in their own way alongside entrepreneurs, people were making wildly different predictions about the future of Webvan (turns out the dark ones were correct), and Steve Ballmer was suggesting dot-coms are still overvalued and overfunded (with perhaps not entirely pure motives).

In a surprising shift in the 2000-internet landscape, CNET bought ZDNET for $1.6-billion (only $0.2-billion less than CBS would buy it for eight years later), and some wondered how this would impact the journalism. Online advertising, at least, appeared to be working and the wireless web was slowly but surely starting to make some sense. The phenomenon of texting was still fresh, as were sneaky phishing scams.

Also, I'd entirely forgotten about the existence of this machine, but it was this week in 2000 that Apple introduced the G4 Cube. It was an utter flop, and Macworld has a great look at the still-ongoing debate about why.

One-Hundred And Eighty-Six Years Ago

Before there were typewriters, there were "typographers" — the cumbersome forerunners that date all the way back to the early 19th century. Though the details of the first known example — an 1808 Italian machine — are mostly lost, it was on July 23rd, 1829 that the first American "typographer" machine was granted a patent. It was invented by William Austin Burt, and would later come to be retroactively known as a typewriter as that word gained popularity.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 12th - 18th

from the moore's-law dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we had lots of followups on stories from last week and other recent developments. We took a closer look at the constitutional analysis of the huge copyright awards in the Tenenbaum case, and saw the first post-Bilski patent appeal reject a software patent. Meanwhile, UK newspapers were responding to Prince's bizarre anti-internet rant, and Larry Lessig was responding to ASCAP's anti-Creative Commons stance by challenging the boss to a debate.

The RIAA was up to all sorts of nonsense, too. Despite the recording industry being in freefall, the association's bosses were getting huge raises; perhaps that's no surprise from an organization with such wacky, self-serving accounting that even major label musicians rarely make money. Then again, some back-of-the-envelope math shows that the RIAA spent $17.6-million on lawsuits to get $391,000 in settlements. As for the voices in the crowd, they were mixed: though the composer who spent last week debating a teenager was sticking to his guns about filesharing, former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner was admitting that it can't be stopped; and at least one record label head was looking towards a future where artists and labels embark on joint ventures. The WSJ was highlighting the problems of 'permission culture', while more people were beginning to realize that copyright serves middlemen, not creators.

On the ACTA front, EU negotiators were presenting the deal to parliament... in secret to the point that even US intellectual property groups were getting nervous. The negotiators ignored their promises of transparency and made no move towards releasing a draft publicly, but of course that didn't matter because it was immediately leaked, teaching us a lot of interesting details. Brazil, meanwhile, was looking at copyright reform that would impose penalties for hindering fair use or the public domain, while we were looking at the possibility of Bolivia opting out of Berne and WIPO altogether.

Ten Years Ago

Hot on the heels of the Grokster ruling, this week in 2005 the recording industry was already pushing to expand (and abuse) the definition of inducement. It was also pushing the line that piracy is dominated by organized crime syndicates, who apparently still offer better service than the legal Napster foisted upon (and ignored by) university students. Perhaps they'd soon declare Amazon a syndicate too, what with it moving into the on-demand DVD printing world. In the Netherlands, at least, ISPs were saved from having to hand info over to the industry, though in Australia a judge decided that even linking to MP3s is illegal.

In a long-anticipated test of all sorts of internet law, the Internet Archive was sued after material from it was used as evidence in a lawsuit. Of course, Canada appeared to be considering a new law that would effectively ban the Internet Archive (not to mention Google) altogether.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years before Napster was legal, crappy and being foisted upon students, it was in a nebulous zone between lawsuits. Musicians were complaining about it with a national advertising campaign, while its famed enemy Lars Ulrich was making his case to Congress — but both seemed to be missing the point. At the same time, despite all this and its legal woes, Napster's traffic was up.

Many people would say we still haven't totally figured out cellphone etiquette today, so you can imagine the conversation in 2000. To paraphrase an old saying, "we can put a living capsule into orbit, but we can't figure out how to use cellphones politely?" (Of course, regarding that, we were also realizing that living in space is dangerous in more ways than one.)

Also in 2000: people were grappling with the definition of the (now-chic) geek, searching for yourself online was still considered egotistical, cutting-edge gaming industry technology was being applied in lots of other places, and of course we had the obligatory concerns about internet dependancy.

Forty-Seven Years Ago

In the history of computing, it's impossible to deny the pivotal role that Intel has played. I'd estimate that about 99% of everything I've ever done on any kind of computer has involved an Intel chip, and that's true for a lot of people. Well, it was today in 1968 that Intel Corporation was founded in Mountain View, California.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: July 5th - 11th

from the lost-history dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, the Joel Tenenbaum continued to echo the Jammie Thomas case as a judge declared the damages to be unconstitutionally excessive. Meanwhile, a heated online debate about file sharing broke out between a teenager and a composer, with at least one music/media professor taking the right side. The never-normal Prince was making bold proclamations about the death of music and the internet, and Kara Swisher was taking his side, while we wondered just how many 'significant blows' against file sharing it would take to make any kind of difference.

We were also fresh out of one of the DHS' big domain seizure rounds, and discovering that they wanted to go after The Pirate Bay and Megaupload as well. Snoop Dogg was sued for sampling while the band Men At Work was ordered to pay 5% of all earnings on 'Down Under' to the publisher of an old folk tune — great examples of the sort of creative interference that doesn't happen in the copyright-free world of food. At least 'Hollywood Accounting' was starting to lose in the courts, while the Washington Post was recognizing how crazy Summit Entertainment can be about Twilight IP. A lawsuit was underway that explored the boundaries of Creative Commons, while we explored some nuances of using free as part of a business model — just don't tell that to the financial columnist who lectured a bunch of little kids for running a free lemonade stand.

Ten Years Ago

The iPhone was still two years out, but the rumors that Apple would be entering the phone business in some big, mysterious way had already been long-circulating, and resurfaced this week in 2005. SOPA was still six years out, but the German recording industry was already onto the idea of poisoning the DNS to block file sharing. The age of MMORPGS was already well underway, and we discovered the strange new industry of real sweatshops farming virtual goods. And people were beginning to realize just how little digital memories fade (even if you want them to).

The EU Parliament faced the question of software patents this week in 2005, and threw out the whole idea with a landslide vote. Back home, supporters of the Broadcast Flag were taking a sneakier approach to dealing with legislators and the public, obfuscating the facts like crazy. That kind of constant obfuscation is how you end up with people who completely fail to understand the difference between trademark and copyright.

A lot of people were focused on 'mobile music'... to a fault, in fact. Some were just worried about mobile phone etiquette in the office. Others were tracking the predicted blog bubble and debating the legality of open Wi-Fi. Amidst all this, though, one huge and sad story swept through the world: the London subway bombings, which served as a tragic coming-of-age event for the internet as news media.

Fifteen Years Ago

It was very quiet on Techdirt this week in 2000, but apparently we didn't stop posting entirely for the 4th of July holiday, especially since Techdirt was getting a bunch of new traffic from being voted 'Cool Stop on the Internet'. Meanwhile, this was still a time of great uncertainty in Silicon Valley, but it was starting to sort itself out: the IPO market clearly hadn't died entirely and a bunch of upcoming IPOs were from companies that were actually profitable, even as major dotcom failures were hurting partners like PR firms and law firms. Unfortunately some entrepreneurs were pulling deceptive tricks to catch the eyes of VCs — perhaps lending some credence to UK residents, who trusted old names more than flashy new dotcoms.

Tech adoption in the world was rapid and only accelerating. Mobile phone penetration kept blasting through more and more key threshholds, while we heard some of the first rumblings of the now-ubiquitous "camera phone". On the flipside, a lot of companies were struggling to accept and respond to online customer inquiries, while students were proving nervous about online college applications which felt a little too much like dropping your future into the void.

Seventy-Eight Years Ago

Film buffs, historians and fans of American culture will all feel a pang of sadness at mention of the Fox vault fire, which happened on July 9th, 1937 when canisters of nitrate film spontaneously combusted and destroyed the only copies of virtually every silent film Fox had made up to that date. It was a staggering loss for the history of cinema, and today we have only snippets and low-quality copies of a handful of the lost films — just enough to give us a taste of everything we're missing.

Today, of course, there's absolutely no good reason for something like this to ever happen again: new films, music, books, photographs and other forms of content can be stored digitally in thousands or millions of places, such that nothing short of the total breakdown of society could wipe them out. And yet the sad truth is that we haven't taken full advantage of this capability: all over the world, committed archivists are being blocked in their efforts by copyright laws, DRM and a general ownership mentality. Right now there are old films rotting in vaults — or getting ready to explode in their canisters — while historians line up outside only to be denied entry. So in truth there are only two things that can destroy our cultural heritage in the digital era: the total breakdown of society, and copyright law.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: June 28th - July 4th

from the it's-all-relative dept

Five Years Ago

Last week, we recalled on ASCAP's attack on Creative Commons. This week in 2010, its own members lashed out at it in response. EFF, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons itself all politely responded to the attack, while we noted that the music publishing industry in general has a bad habit of aggression towards consumer's groups and those who respect individual rights.

The Swedish Pirate Party was seeking to host The Pirate Bay from inside the Swedish parliament, while Dutch ISPs were fighting against demands that they block the site entirely, even as Dutch public television was experimenting with BitTorrent distribution. Meanwhile, the pilot of TV show Pioneer One was released on BitTorrent and quickly raised $20,000 do create more episodes.

The Supreme Court's Bilski Ruling came out, narrowly allowing software and business model patents to survive while dropping plenty of hints that the court was against software patents in the long run. The IEEE, on the other hand, just celebrated.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, there were two other expected and fairly predictable rulings from the Supreme Court: Grokster and Brand X. Sweden was putting a bad file-sharing law into effect while a Taiwanese court ruled that file-sharing software is completely legal. The EU wanted an EU-wide licensing scheme for music downloads, former RIAA boss Hilary Rosen realized that these victories might not be victories and at least one record label surprised us by not blaming technology for its problems. Warner Brothers, on the other hand, was still actively rebelling against new business models, while UK residents were discovering that their home VHS copies were the only remaining records of shows the BBC never kept.

Newspapers were having fun making pointless and/or obvious observations about the digital age, like the fact that online directions are sometimes wrong, or that user-created content is popular, or that giant would-you-rather studies about technology yield weird results.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years before that, the New York Times was already criticizing geeks while lexicographers were struggling to agree on the correct spelling of "dot-com" (or .com or dotcom or...) A former top music exec was pointing out that file-sharing can't be stopped, while a current top music exec was insisting he'll crush digital music sites entirely.

Some high-profile outages also rocked the web this week in 2000: Yahoo! went down when a fiber line was severed, United Airlines' website disappeared for most of a morning, and most shocking of all, a glitch took down Techdirt's front page for an hour and a half.

One-Hundred And Ten Years Ago

We've had lots of technology history lately, so this week let's take a break for some science history. It was on June 30th, 1905 that the Annalen der Physik science journal received Albert Einstein's paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which established the theory of special relativity. The universe would never be the same again.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the decent! dept

Five Years Ago

These were the early days of the Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning affair, but apart from that, this week in 2010 was mostly like the last: jam-packed with activity on the copyright front. BPI was sending takedowns to Google in what appeared to be part of a broader plan, while the IFPI was trying to get the search giant to stop linking to The Pirate Bay entirely. German newspaper publishers were seeking copyright on headlines, while up in Canada the Heritage Minister called those who oppose stricter copyright law radical extremists (and then denied it, only to find out it was caught on video). The major labels were busy astroturfing in favor of three-strikes while trying to avoid paying songwriters, and ASCAP was demonizing Creative Commons.

We got one very bad ruling this week in 2010, when an appeals court said it's okay to take stuff out of the public domain and put it back under copyright. We also got a very good one when the court ruled in favor of YouTube in the Viacom lawsuit. Of course, that battle was far from over, but for the time being Viacom was in denial about the result while we wondered what its true implications were. The White House released its strategic plan for intellectual property and it wasn't as bad as we expected, but were disappointed to learn that the administration had pivoted from supporting copyright exceptions for the blind to fighting against them. Meanwhile, lots of researchers and other people were trying to tell the true story: how weaker copyright benefits culture and society, how the lack of fair use coverage for satire stifles free speech, how the recording industry made file-sharing much worse for itself, how there's no evidence that kicking people offline for file-sharing is in any way necessary, and how things like the Digital Economy Act and ACTA will stifle creativity.

Ten Years Ago

Much that was happening in 2005 this week mirrors what was happening in 2010. Canada was grappling with an earlier round of copyright reform, America's Copyright Czar was proposing major changes that were potentially good and potentially bad, and lines were being clearly drawn between the camps for sharing and owning culture. The recording industry was trying out a too-little-too-late plan to compete with unauthorized file-sharing, but it was the MPAA that was really up to no good: it tried to sneak broadcast flag legislation into the law, and then made some grandiose claims about its anti-piracy successes (then, when called on the numbers, tried to explain them away as hypothetical future piracy). Even the FTC was starting to see through Hollywood's anti-file-sharing claims (and so were the kids), while we revisited the ways the fashion industry thrives without copyright.

Also this week in 2005, the EU was moving forwards on software patents despite the fact that the politicians voting for it didn't understand the difference between patents and copyright. We got one great example of the ridiculousness of such patents too, when Apple was sued over the iTunes interface.

Fifteen Years Ago

In 2000, the file-sharing debate was just as heated but far more streamlined, with almost everything focused on the still-prominent Napster, which had just hired the government's lead attorney in the Microsoft case. One independent band, meanwhile, launched StopNapster.com — though on the other hand, the Economist was rightly pointing out that Napster is a wake-up call and proof that online distribution is feasible. Some companies were trying more "creative" offerings, like gas pumps that let you download music while you fill up, and the world drew closer and closer to the iPod with the advent of the first 1GB portable media player hard drive.

NASA announced that it had, for some reason, perfected porn-blocking software. It hadn't, and neither had anybody else who tried. The Librarian of Congress displayed his cluelessness about the internet, while Microsoft was airing a bizarre media campaign starring Bill Gates. The EU was setting up to probe the AOL/Time Warner merger, Sony was getting ready to storm the mobile phone market, and Kmart was making yet another attempt at getting online.

Forty & Eighteen Years Ago

This week, we look at two interesting milestones in the history of free speech in the US, and more specifically one of its most complex and storied wrinkles: obscenity and indecency. First, it was on June 26th, 1975 that the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Miller v. California, establishing the three-prong "Miller Test" for obscene (and thus unprotected) speech. It requires that all three conditions be satisfied:

• Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
• Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
• Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Two decades later, a related law hit the scene: the Communications Decency Act. When it gets brought up here at Techdirt, it's mostly with regards to the Section 230 safe harbors, which have had an impact far beyond the subject of "decency". But the Act's original primary purpose was to protect children from seeing bad stuff online, and much of this has been struck down or altered since, with one notable date being June 26th, 1997 — the same day as the establishment of the Miller Test, 22 years later — when the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union that the indecency provisions of the CDA were unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the not-so-much-difference-engine dept

Five Years Ago

If you're reading this from a Starbucks, take a moment to celebrate: it was this week in 2010 that the chain first announced its plan to offer free Wi-Fi (something we'd been saying since 2003).

Once you're done celebrating, it's time to come back to the reality of all the stupid stuff that was happening that same week. In the midst of the campaign to sue people who shared The Hurt Locker, the producers defended their use of the true story it was based on as part of their free speech rights, though at least one independent director was pointing out that filesharing only hurts bad movies. Following the RIAA's victory over LimeWire, music publishers decided to pile on with their own lawsuit, while some people were starting to question the IsoHunt decision and Rapidshare was countersuing Perfect 10 for being a copyright troll. The government was getting ready to enact a law that made universities subsidize the entertainment industry, while a new anti-piracy campaign compared downloading to "killing" pop stars — while we noted that big labels and singers seem to copy from each other quite a lot. Who could blame them? Copying is often efficient and smart, copyright is barely workable when recording everything is standard, and (some) content creators were starting to come to terms with the fact that their work will be shared.

Others, like the producers of Twilight, were suing fashion designers for simply mentioning Bella and holding official Twilight t-shirt design contests where no official Twilight material is allowed. Still others, like many modern jazz musicians, were being held back by the copyright regimeseeking special exemptions from said regime. The RIAA was busy up in Canada, astroturfing for a Canadian DMCA and doing a damn good job of it.

Ten Years Ago

Oh the formats, they are a'changin' — this week in 2005, the bell began to toll for many an old medium. Wal-Mart supposedly announced that it would no longer sell VHS movies, and though it later denied the report, the signs still couldn't be clearer, much like they were for cassette tapes, supposed death of the music industry. EMI jumped on the CD copy protection bandwagon, accelerating that format's path to obsolescence, while reports were urging the music industry to embrace file sharing. Libraries were introducing (but still struggling with) digital downloads, the number of mainly-online news readers hit 20%, and surveys were already showing that people much preferred watching movies at home.

And when formats shift, industries panic. Some were calling for universal DRM or struggling to maintain their walled gardens, some were still pressuring congress to approve the broadcast flag, journalists were railing against Wikipedia and Warner Movies was threatening ISPs in the hunt for user data, while the MPAA was doubletalking about Grokster and Bob Geldof was calling eBay evil.

Fifteen Years Ago

Not much changes. This week in 2000, the RIAA was going crazy against Napster and seeking the removal of all major label songs, while the CEO was insisting the service is completely legal. Internet speeds were getting closer to making movie piracy a large-scale reality, while the MPAA's attack on illegal rebroadcasting signalled that it would surely behave much like the RIAA when faced with that reality. The web was already changing journalism and people were already going online for news... and journalists already weren't getting it. One person was surprisingly on-the-ball, though: Courtney Love, one of the first musicians to speak out with real insight on the music industry moving into the digital age.

The UK's Royal Navy embarrassed itself by accidentally emailing lots of confidential info to a teenage girl, while the US Navy was touting its new ability to send emails from submarines. JP Morgan made its own embarrassing error when it failed to pay the $35 to renew jpmorgan.com. Meanwhile, it was still trendy to ask the big questions about the internet: what do people really think of it? Does it actually increase productivity? And how do you keep kids innocent online?

64 & 193 Years Ago

June 14th marks two concurrent and related anniversaries in the history of computing. First, in 1822 it was the day Charles Babbage proposed his Difference Engine, the theoretical mechanical marvel that heralded the computing revolution way ahead of schedule. So it's fitting that it was also on June 14th, over a century later in 1951, that UNIVAC I, the first ever commercial computer produced in the US, was dedicated.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the digital-antiques dept

Five Years Ago

There was a whole lot of copyright news this week in 2010. The organizers of a Bulgarian chess tournament were suing over a copyright on chess moves, copyright was holding back research, and a top public school was seeking to copyright and sell its curriculum. Armenia decided it needed incredibly strict copyright laws while the IFPI was complaining that Canada's new copyright laws weren't strict enough, and a Spanish court (not the first) found file-sharing to be legal. One US court smacked down a lawyer for bad faith pursuit of copyright infringement, while another was expressing skepticism over US Copyright Group's lumping together of cases (while many of the targets claimed innocence).

We considered a key question about whether the RIAA's lawsuits had been a "success" while some took a closer look at the association's rise and fall (debunking the idea that it was all about Napster), and Thom Yorke was pinning the lifespan of record labels in the months, not years. Also in need of debunking was the claim that unauthorized handheld games cost the economy tens of billions, not to mention Authors Guild president Scott Turow's freakout about book piracy. Amidst all this, we asked a simple question: is intellectual property immoral?

Ten Years Ago

Five years earlier, press in the UK was happily parroting the recording industry's spin on everything while the country's new creative minister was trying to increase the copyright term for pop songs lest Elvis hit the public domain. Apple's iTunes store was taking on the file-sharing networks (though it wasn't clear to what extent) and people were beginning to notice the curious copyright questions surrounding wedding photography.

The Apple-Intel rumours finally graduated to an official announcement (and some wondered if Apple might sue CNET over the early leak). Journalists at the WSJ got a taste of working without email when their system went down, and AOL finally dipped its toes into the web with a free email service and portal. Firefox was gaining ground in the browser wars, United became the first domestic airline to offer in-flight Wi-Fi, and the FCC bumped up the deadline for TV broadcasts to go digital.

Also this week in 2005, Congress was moving forward with a patent reform bill that was mostly bad with a little good thrown in, while we highlighted an economic analysis of why patents are inefficient in emerging markets.

Fifteen Years Ago

All eyes were on the dot-com world this week in 2000. With a sudden emphasis on actually making money ruining a lot of people's fun, startups were furiously racing to profitability while still advertising on every surface they could find (the latest: shopping bags). But not everything works out — sometimes acquisitions fail, and sometimes dot-coms collapse and are tough to liquidate.

A judge handed down the first ruling that Microsoft must be broken up this week in 2000, while IBM was trying to revive its PC business. CBS, meanwhile, laid off a quarter of its internet staff.The UK government was losing track of its laptops and struggling to understand what meta-tags were.

The first major mobile phone worm appeared in the wild, leading antivirus companies to immediately start peddling protection (not that they ever blow anything out of proportion or anything like that). More and more men were seeking wives online, while at least one internet dater found himself victim of a carjacking scheme.

Thirty-Eight Years Ago

I know many Techdirt readers have fond memories of the Apple II, one of the first truly successful personal computers. Well, it was on June 10th, 1977 that the very first Apple II computers went on sale. The machine's number one hook was its color graphics, which were practically unheard of at its price-point and attracted a lot of consumer attention.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 31st - June 6th

from the fourteen-plus-fourteen dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we were following mass copyright threat campaigns and disappointed to see Verizon handing names over to US Copyright Group, but happy to see the EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU ask a judge to put a stop to the subpoenas. At the same time, we wondered if US Copyright Group and ACS:Law might be working together.

It was the fourth anniversary of the raid that took down the Pirate Bay (for a couple days), which had yet to have any significant effect. We saw some early entries in what would become the Righthaven saga, a Dutch court said that just linking to movies is illegal, and Canada introduced a new copyright bill with DMCA-like anti-circumvention provisions (while admitting that the last bill was all about keeping US diplomats happy). Meanwhile, author Joe Konrath was experimenting with piracy to see how it impacted his sales, Ashton Kutcher and Lionsgate were 'self-pirating' their new film as a publicity stunt, and some successful content creators were worried about the Viacom lawsuit interfering with their use of YouTube. Scott Adams noticed (and accepted) that the price of content is trending towards zero, while David Gerrold argued that any industry that thinks filesharing is bad is ignoring customers.

Ten Years Ago

Last week, with the benefit of hindsight, I was able to note that the rumours of Apple switching to Intel were (for the first time) true. This week in 2005 the rumours solidified, confirming suspicions and forcing a lot of incredulous analysts to eat their words (though the official announcement wouldn't come until the following Monday).

The internet was changing the way people interact with entertainment in big ways. The line between advertising and content was getting blurrier, as was the entire concept of a "television channel" (which appeared to be on the way out), and as were the borders between regions (which, as Sony was learning, had become meaningless). The perennial concern that digital music is too low-quality reared an early head with a $9,500 device that makes Pono and Tidal look like bargains. DVD-trading communities were struggling because it turns out nobody wants bad DVDs, and hotel check-in kiosks weren't doing great either. But we did see hints of an exciting future, with more examples of patron-donation models for creators.

We learned that the recording industry stalked Kazaa's CEO for months, and that the MPAA was funding public surveillance of him — so it's unsurprising that lots of folks (as always way ahead of the *AA) were working on a more anonymous version of BitTorrent. ICANN agreed to create a .xxx TLD while we watched the .kids.us domain get only 21 websites in three years. Speaking of not understanding kids, California tried to ban textbooks over 200 pages in a misguided attempt to embrace the internet.

Fifteen Years Ago

Sony had resisted digital music sales until this week in 2000, when they made a selection of 50 tracks available for download (at a high price, in a special DRM format, of course). MP3.com was trying its own strategy — piping music directly to retailers — while The Offspring had the creative idea of cheekily selling Napster merchandise. Amidst all this, we noted that the recording industry was full of mixed messages, hating piracy but marketing to pirates. In short, it seemed like they didn't get it. Much like National Geographic didn't get Burning Man, high society didn't get the internet and its nouveau-riche, and high schools didn't get that free e-mail services are good.

These seemed like uncertain days for Silicon Valley, but people were beginning to realize that VC money was not in fact drying up and they were still spending like crazy. Of course, those Dot Coms that didn't survive tended to just disappear, since they had very little to be sold off.

Two-Hundred And Twenty-Five Years Ago

A few weeks ago I marked the 1710 passage of the Statute of Anne, forerunner of all modern copyright law. This week, we mark the next milestone in that saga: the signing of the Copyright Act of 1790 on May 31st, the first federal copyright law in the United States, and established the well-known (around here) original copyright term of 14+14 years for books, maps and charts.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 24th - 30th

from the information-through-the-ages dept

Five Years Ago

Boy was there a lot of copyright nonsense going on this week in 2010. The first 5,000 Hurt Locker filesharing lawsuits hit the courts, while another shakedown operation (ACS:Law) was trying to trick users into incriminating themselves with questionnaires, and yet another (US Copyright Group) was trying to pin liability on ISPs that don't cough up customer info; James Murdoch delivered a confused lecture on copyright at University College London, the Senate was considering a bill that would give Customs officers the authority to check for DMCA-violating anti-circumvention devices, and we saw copyright fights over the 2000-year-old Tao Te Ching and Einstein's likeness. Politicians couldn't seem to stop using unlicensed music in commercials, while Canada's industry minister admitted he breaks copyright law frequently.

On the flipside, however, Lady Gaga was saying it's no problem if people download her music, OK Go and Amanda Palmer teamed up to celebrate escaping their record labels, and Joe Konrath was explaining why authors shouldn't fear file sharing. Some big movie studios were embracing fan fiction, Blizzard was taking a stand against DRM, and the ABA Journal was highlighting how the music industry is thriving and copyright isn't so important. Amidst all this, we wondered if you could replace copyrights and patents with fairness-based liability and examined how the fashion industry thrives without copyright.

Also this week in 2010, we announced the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event.

Ten Years Ago

In 2010 James Murdoch was lecturing universities, but the same week in 2005 we discovered that DMCA champion Jon Dudas was lecturing schoolchildren. Publishers were freaking out about Google's book scanning project, MPAA-head Dan Glickman was blaming technology for everything, Sony Music's CEO was trying to stop the tide of change, and the Senate was a total echo chamber on copyright issues. A Billboard writer was on a crusade against Creative Commons while the recording industry was on a crusade against anyone having any fun with music at all. TV networks were trying to lock down content using the broadcast flag (but at least some were pointing out that it's a bad idea).

Spyware was also a big target this week in 2005, with the House passing not one but two bills designed to counter it while some debated the complex legal questions of what exactly spyware is (and Microsoft fought to make sure that definition didn't hurt them).

This week in 2005 was also when we heard the (finally true) rumors that Apple would be switching to Intel chips.

Fifteen Years Ago

Back in innocent 2000, people were still grappling with just how much technology changes our lives, which of course included lots of internet backlash. Some countries were presaging the future — like Japan, where cell-phone web access was way ahead of the US — while others were clinging to the past — like France, which was looking at requiring registration to put up a website. People were growing to like and trust online media, though the same cannot be said for summer blockbuster movie websites or Ticketmaster's online service. And of course, the record industry was attempting to blame Napster for decreased CD sales, despite their own numbers showing the big drop happened pre-Napster.

Four-Hundred And Twenty Years Ago

There's a mostly-dead word, "nomenclator", that contains within itself an interesting history of humans and our relationship with information. In classical times, it referred to a slave who helped a politician remember people's names, then to someone whose job was to remember all kinds of information for someone, and to the person who announces arrivals at a party or gathering. But in 1595, it took on an entirely different, non-human meaning: a catalogue of a library's contents. On May 24, the Leiden University Library opened with the first ever such book — the Nomenclator autorum omnium, quorum libri vel manuscripti, vel typis expressi exstant in Bibliotheca Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (List of all authors whose books, whether manuscript or printed, are available in Leiden University Library).

Filed Under: history, look back