This Week In Techdirt History: October 12 - 18th

from the looking-all-the-way-back dept

Five Years Ago:

We were still wondering about the attempts to insert the morality question into copyright, noting that it is almost always used to "cover up the inability to justify the expansion of rights on economic grounds." In a somewhat related post, we wondered what kind of industry sets up a group to specifically oppose what consumers want -- and the answer was: Hollywood. Another such group is the BSA, and it was finally having some of its nastier practices revealed. Sticking to the copyright question, we wondered if libraries really needed licenses to lend out ebooks, since they don't need permission to lend out regular books. ASCAP had a judge disabuse it of the notion that a ringtone is a public performance while a guy who uploaded his own book to Google and clicked the wrong button (making it available) then sued Google for infringement.

The Associated Press and News Corp. were demanding money from Google (of course) along with other "aggregators" though, News Corp. apparently forgot it had its own aggregators who didn't appear to pay up any money at all. Oops. NY's Department of Labor reduced the unemployment benefits of an unemployed blogger because he put AdSense on his blog (making around $1/day), claiming that it was unrevealed employment.

This was back in the day when people were still insisting that YouTube could never be profitable, but at least things like UK's Channel 4 were agreeing to put full shows on the site. In a surprise move, EMI actually did a licensing deal with Grooveshark, which (of course) later went away. A bunch of new music streaming services were hitting the market, and we didn't expect much from Mog or Rdio. Rdio's still around, but Mog got bought by Beats which got bought by Apple.

Indian officials wanted to block Skype while Finland was declaring broadband a human right. We also had our first post about the ridiculous Jenzabar case in which a former Tiananmen Square activist turned entrepreneur was abusing trademark law to stifle a documentary that made her look bad. Finally, five years ago, we disagreed with something Larry Lessig wrote -- which doesn't happen all that often around here.

Ten Years Ago:

John Ashcroft's Justice Department was eager to be Hollywood's private police force. But, in an important decision, the Supreme Court decided not to review an important ruling that said the RIAA couldn't demand names from ISPs without first filing a lawsuit (copyright trolls keep "rediscovering" this supposed "loophole" without checking out the case law on it). Starbucks thought it was going to get into the music business while Amazon thought it was going to rent DVDs (a la Netflix). Google also released its desktop search offering, which never took off.

Remember the OQO modular computer system? Probably not. It was insanely hyped varporware that people were talking about for years, but then it finally came out ten years ago and was overpriced and not very impressive. Applied Digital, a company famous for overstating claims about its "implantable" VeriChip was up to its usual games. Diebold e-voting machines had their usual problems. The FCC was in the process of killing off line sharing and people were realizing that all the doom and gloom predictions about how the phone "do not call" list would kill the economy were not even close to true.

Fifteen Years Ago:

We were getting close to Y2K and suggesting that it wasn't going to be a big deal (we were right on that one!). Bertelsmann and Xerox started experimenting with an early print on demand books offering, while we were excited that e-paper was finally coming.

On the patent front, noted patent maximalist Priceline was suing Microsoft for patent infringement, while Visa had to settle a lawsuit with a woman who gambled away $70,000 online and blamed Visas for not stopping her. While it obviously didn't apply to that woman, studies were showing that people were still afraid to use credit cards online.

Oh yeah. Also, 15 years ago this week, we wrote a short post about how people kept stealing other people's AOL passwords to break into their accounts. The story itself isn't noteworthy. But for the next fifteen years -- yes, right up until now -- idiotic people doing searches on "how to steal AOL passwords" somehow ended up on that page and would post details of the accounts whose passwords they wanted.

Twenty Years Ago:

We weren't yet publishing, but the first Netscape Navigator was released, sparking part of the revolution that led us to start Techdirt just a few years later. I still remember when Netscape came out. I had been a loyal user of the Mosaic browser, and so I rushed to download Netscape. But, since I had a pokey 2400 baud dialup modem in my dorm room at college, I had to make sure my roommate was okay with me leaving the phone line tied up all night to download the "massive" Netscape file (which I think was a massive 4 megs). If I remember correctly, the phone hung up in the middle of the first night and I had to wait until the next night to get the whole file down.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 6th - 12th

from the hindsight dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2009, we were awaiting the shutdown of Geocities, and contemplating what it could teach us about the future of the web. We were similarly contemplating the implications of the FTC's new disclosure rules.

The always-aggressive IOC was trying to block Olympia, Washington's Olympian newspaper from trademarking its name and threatening Flickr users for posting photos from the Beijing Games. Apple started a trademark fight with Woolworths over a barely-similar logo halfway around the world. CBS was, confusingly, trying to take down clips of David Letterman's recent and infamous on-air confession. Ralph Lauren was discovering the Streisand Effect following a Bad Photoshop Scandal. And Steve Ballmer, bafflingly, declared that "free is not a business model!"

Finally, five years ago this week, we wrote a fairly short post about the FBI going way overboard in their investigation of a programmer. At the time, we had no idea that Aaron Swartz's story would continue, nor did we know how tragically it would end. We didn't even use his known-in-some-circles-but-not-yet-famous name in the headline — an odd thing to see now. It's moments of contrast and reflection like this, I think, that are the true value of these Techdirt History posts, and I hope you all agree.

Ten Years Ago

Last week, we noted that SpaceShipOne had completed its first of two flights. This week, it completed the second and officially won the X-Prize. For the rest of the world, this week was a mix of tech-optimism and tech-panic.

Okay... mostly panic. Wardrivers were on the loose! The internet was causing sex obsession! Video games were terribly addictive! People were misdiagnosing themselves online and becomng cyberchondriacs! (Actually, that last one was and still is pretty accurate, I suppose.)

But there was a bit of optimism: a study suggested that texting brings families closer.

This week in 2004 is also when Google launched (or re-launched) Book Search, planting the seeds of a legal controversy that rages to this day. We've also got yet another quote from Steve Ballmer, this time as part of Microsoft's (futile) efforts to create a new DRM. Ballmer trashed Apple, saying "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'." Of course, another reporter suggested the whole thing might not have been as ridiculous as it sounded.

Fifteen Years Ago

Survivor is in its 29th series, with the 30th set to start in 2015. But this week in 1999 it hadn't even begun — its May 2000 launch was being aggressively promoted, and even Techdirt couldn't resist commenting on the idea. But hey, this is back when Silicon Valley was weird, and some executives believed technology came from aliens, or something like that.

In 2004 we had videogame addiction, but in 1999 we had an early stab at the simpler web addiction. But this was a time when net hype tended to win out — and a time when geography still mattered for this kind of thing, which is why that net hype was just spreading to the UK. Wal-Mart's much-hyped website was delayed, Amazon had just added a gift registry, and UPS was offering free internet access... but only to the UPS website.

Oh, and long before PRISM, there was Echelon. Remember Echelon? This week in 1999, some folks were trying to figure out how to gag it.

One-Hundred And Forty-Six Years Ago

Long-time fans of the site surely know that Mike Masnick's alma mater is Cornell University. Well, this week in 1868 marks its inauguration and subsequent enrollment of 412 students, the highest of any American university up to that time.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 20th - 27th

from the a-week!-a-week! dept

Five Years Ago

We sort of foreshadowed this last week, but five years ago this week, we had our little dust-up with singer Lily Allen -- something I still can't quite understand. It started with Lily posting a bit of a rant against file sharing, which we felt was a bit misguided. Then, Lily decided to double down and set up an entire blog entitled "It's Not Alright" in which she apparently planned to discuss how copying and file sharing was simply "not alright." Except... her very first post happened to be her copying an entire Techdirt article (without credit or a link). The copied article was about 50 Cent's more enlightened view on copyright. Lily reposted our entire article and then slammed 50 Cent. We noted that we have no problem with anyone copying our articles, but it sure seemed strange for Ms. Allen to create an entire blog post about how "it's not alright" to copy, and then copied our entire article (again, without credit).

Allen then updated her website with an semi-apology to me, while still insisting that she thought it was "quite obvious" that she "wasn't trying to pass off those words" as her own. Of course, that wasn't the concern. Very little copyright infringement is about plagiarism (which is about passing off someone else's words as your own). Our point was merely that perhaps her views on copying being "not alright" weren't entirely well thought out when she, herself, clearly copied our words without a thought. But then it got stranger. That's because someone alerted us to the fact that part of the way Lily became famous was distributing mixtapes, which mixed in her music with lots of other famous recording artists. Now, lots of musicians do this. It's considered pretty common these days, but it doesn't make it any less infringing. Even more bizarre was that these mixtapes were being distributed off of Allen's official website, which had a big copyright notice on it, courtesy of her label, EMI. So, for someone speaking out about how it was "not alright" to copy others, she sure didn't seem to take heed of that herself.

Lily responded by "answering some questions," but it really just repeated her claims about it's "not alright." She didn't address the hypocritical nature of her own copying (and distributing) of others' works. She also insisted that music couldn't be free. We asked her some questions that we hoped she'd actually answer, including about her own use of free, while slamming the concept of free. Following this, she put up a big blog post that tried to respond to my questions, but which we felt missed the mark. Her post was only up for a few hours, and as I was writing about it, she not only took the post down, but the whole blog down, never to return. The next day she showed up at an event, and suddenly people were claiming that there were horrible attacks online against her leading some people to accuse me of attacking her for merely pointing out inconsistencies in her statements and actions (a recording industry lawyer insisted that I lead "my army" of internet "hackers" to attack her -- which is all sorts of hilarious). A few days later, she claimed she was quitting music altogether, something that almost no one believed to be true, and which wasn't true. She did, eventually, release more music, including a song attacking internet trolls. It was quite a week.

It wasn't all Lily Allen that week. This was also the week that a bank screwed up and sent confidential info to someone's Gmail account, leading a judge to order Google to kill the entire account -- a reaction that seemed a bit on the extreme side. Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, who wrote a book about how awful the internet was (spending way too much time dissecting anonymous Techdirt comments), blamed the plethora of bad reviews of the book on the fact that publishers asked the people he insulted (all of us internet shut ins, of course) to review the book (or, maybe, the book just sucked). Meanwhile, an author in New Zealand claimed that libraries were engaging in grand theft by loaning books.

CAFC was being CAFC and said that you could patent medical diagnostics in the Mayo Clinic case, setting up an epic smackdown from the Supreme Court that set the framework for future epic smackdowns, including the most recent in the Alice ruling. Texas Instruments was angry at calculator hackers and some ridiculous Canadian professor tried to insist that an injunction that would stop the sale of Microsoft Word due to a questionable patent infringement claim would be good for society because patents patents patents. Speaking of patents and craziness, a ridiculous SLAPP suit against Rick Frenkel, who had blogged anonymously as the "patent troll tracker" was set to begin, though it settled quickly (after all, the goal was really just to out Frenkel).

In other news, DMCA safe harbors are super important, people aren't that interested in paying for news and DRM doesn't enable business models. Oh, and I still love this story about a clothing firm pirating their own clothes.

Ten Years Ago:

Judge Baer tossed out part of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act that said selling bootlegs was copyright infringement, saying it basically granted perpetual copyright. Unfortunately, the appeals court overruled him later. Patents were in the news: patents were piling up in search and in WiFi, foreshadowing some patent troll fights to come. Someone claimed that merely offering internet access in public spaces was patented. Netflix was taking tentative steps towards offering downloadable movies while people were already suggesting that the price of music downloads needed to drop.

The 9/11 Commission Report was both public domain and available totally free -- and yet was a massive best seller. And yet some people still insist that you can't make money off of free or without copyright? A UK newspaper felt that if it pulled some of it content off the web that would make more people buy the paper edition (wonder how that worked out). Meanwhile, electronic voting machines continued to mysteriously lose votes.

In the telco world, people were talking about the insanity of phone bills that had more unadvertised fees than the official "cost" of the service. Telcos were still fighting back against muni-broadband and broadcasters were still resistant to freeing up spectrum. Some things never change.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Still in the heart of the dot com bubble, NetZero, the free ISP went public at a $3 billion valuation. Speaking of free, a new registrar was launching that would offer you free domain names, but you had to run their ads on your site. Virginia was claiming that it was the "Capital of the Internet" which never made much sense. Yahoo was setting up its own taxis in San Francisco. It could have been Uber! We were talking about an early music storage locker and predicting a day when your phone could stream your music from the internet no matter where you were (not a bad prediction).

The NY Times, in its typically curmudgeon fashion, was bothered by the idea of people using instant messaging at work. And, yes, there was patent trouble, as NCR was claiming that Netscape violated its patents.

Four Hundred And Thirty Four Years Ago:

Sir Francis Drake finished his circumnavigation of the globe, the second trip to do so. Of course, since Drake is widely considered to be a pirate, I'd have to say this marks the first ever "global pirate scourge."

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the going-back-in-time dept

Five Years Ago

A Canadian appeals court let common sense prevail and said that merely linking to a website was not defamatory. Over in the UK libel laws were still out of control, creating real chilling effects for criticism. Meanwhile, Oregon wanted to sue a guy who posted the state's own guide to using public laws because, apparently, the state prefers the public to be ignorant of the law (easier to lock 'em up that way). Meanwhile, a sheriff used Craigslist to arrest some prostitutes, and rather than realizing how the tool helped him do the job, he blamed Craigslist for the prostitutes being so easy to arrest.

The legacy entertainment industry was pushing its bogus propaganda on school children, and even more ridiculous, part of the program was trying to create propaganda that could then be distributed to local newspapers and TV stations to distribute the propaganda. On the flip side, some were pointing out that privacy rights and copyright often come into conflict, even though few people really consider that fact. ASCAP and BMI were demanding money for the 30 second previews that online music stores were selling, because of course they'd demand that. And up in Canada, the industry wanted a new tax on the iPod because of course they'd want that. A newspaper exec was claiming that search engines "break into our homes"... by driving more traffic to their websites. Some things never change.

Things started to get heated with musicians disagreeing about how to deal with the internet. A group of musicians spoke out strongly against blaming fans and kicking them off the internet for file sharing. In response, another group of musicians attacked that first group of musicians, calling them "unhelpful" and "destructive" for daring to suggest that maybe attacking fans isn't a good idea. 50 Cent came out and pointed out that piracy is just a part of the marketing, leading Lily Allen to go on a bit of a rant about how evil piracy was and how the internet is destroying the music industry and all that. If you've been reading Techdirt for a while, you may recall what happened next, but we'll save that for next week... Meanwhile, a new research paper was showing best practices in online music offerings -- and it didn't include Lily Allen.

Ten Years Ago

We were, of course, discussing new business models for the music industry -- with the main one being patronage (a model that has become increasingly popular these days). Guess what? We were also discussing net neutrality a decade ago, because this is the debate that will never end. Microsoft software was shutting down air traffic in California, because what's air traffic control without some blue screens of death? AT&T was engaged in price gouging during a Florida hurricane, because it's AT&T.

The masters of vaporware, the Phantom Gaming Console was a big story for a product that many believed was a scam all along. Patent trolls were suing lots of internet companies because that's what they do. Some people were asking to use mobile phones in airplanes, though that didn't get very far. And finally, people assumed that instant messaging at work must be a bad thing with no actual evidence to support that.

Fifteen Years Ago:

This was a big one. Fifteen years ago this week the White House finally eased off its restrictions against exporting encryption, a move that was vital to increasing internet security. Speaking of internet security, we were already dealing with FUD around cybersecurity as there were reports of Russian hackers breaking into the Defense Department. Also Hotmail had a security breach, because it's Hotmail. And Network Solutions, which still controlled all domain names, revealed everyone's passwords. Oh, and if you were really afraid of the upcoming Y2K threat, you could rent a self-sufficient mansion in the South Pacific for a few months on either side of Y2K.

In the music world, Sony Music was acting like a typical major record label in telling bands that they had to give up lifetime rights to any URL that had the band's name in it. Way to internet, Sony Music. A reporter at Fortune couldn't find an MP3 and declared the whole concept of downloadable music over (Fortune reporters weren't exactly fortune tellers). We were already discussing the end of software in the age of the internet. Oh yeah, and remember when AOL was the big internet company everyone feared? 15 years ago, eBay gave AOL $75 million just so that it wouldn't start its own auction site.

One Hundred And Twenty One Years Ago:

On September 20th of 1893, Charles Duryea road-tested the first ever gasoline-powered automobile. Today, of course, it seems like we're finally trying to move past gasoline-powered cars.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the looking-back dept

Five Years Ago

Patents, patents and more patents were in the news. It was getting so crazy that even Dilbert was trying to tackle the issue. IBM was trying to convince the world that patent protection was the key to open source software (ha ha). Intel founder Andy Grove was promoting a use it or lose it provision for patents, while Ben Goldacre was highlighting how much harm pharma patents had done. And because who doesn't love a story about an absolutely ridiculous patent, we had one about someone claiming to have patented adding a .com to the end of an address bar (the company was demanding millions from every browser maker).

On the copyright front, we were looking at how performance rights groups like ASCAP helped funnel money from smaller artists to big artists. Hollywood was out there trying to kill another innovation as it took on the nefarious Redbox. The UK government took a study with just 136 individuals (who all self-reported) and used it to conclude there were 7 million illegal file sharers in the UK. The recording industry in Japan was trying to get the Japanese government to break your phone if you listened to unauthorized music. And the geniuses at Forrester were telling the music industry to copy the movie industry's awful "windowing" technique and release music in different formats in different stages (a recipe guaranteed to increase piracy rates).

On the journalism beat, one newspaper was saying that it wouldn't cover political candidates unless they bought ads while some out of touch NY Times guy was whining about people who thought Twitter was a new front for journalism.

Finally, Glenn Beck might not have raped and murdered a girl in 1990, but he sure wanted to do everything possible to stop people from asking if he had. On the flip side, filmmaker/story teller/cool guy Kevin Smith was still awesome about the internet and questions concerning copyright (speaking of Smith, if you haven't followed the story of how he ended up making his latest movie, Tusk, you've missed out on one great story about connecting with fans). Oh, and we went way, way, way back to 1773 to look at an important legal decision detailing why copyright is not property.

Ten Years Ago

Two rather important legal cases were decided this week ten years ago -- one good, one bad. First, the hugely important ruling in CDT v. Pappert, which dumped a bad law in Pennsylvania that required ISPs to filter out porn. The second was the Bridgeport v. Dimension Films appeal, which we were just talking about yesterday, in which a court ruled "get a license or do not sample" and further claimed of such a requirement "we do not see this as stifling creativity in any way." Perhaps because the appeals court judges weren't even remotely creative themselves.

In a weird bit of worlds colliding, the RIAA got sued for patent infringement by Altnet, the quite odd patent trolling/adware company that tried to make a "business" out of file sharing. It claimed that the RIAA's hashing technique for identifying songs being shared violated its patent. Meanwhile, DVR makers TiVo and Replay each agreed to make their products suck a little more by adding some DRM to appease an angry Hollywood. Congress, at the RIAA's request, was trying to make it a criminal offense if you shared 1,000 or more works. A Japanese newspaper was mad at Google News for "infringing" on its headlines (or so the newspaper claimed).

Finally, in a bit of perceptiveness, ten years ago we wondered whether there would be distributed backup services in the future (yup), whether the concept of area codes would matter any more thanks to mobile phones and VoIP (not so much), and we wrote about people speculating how five innovative companies in 2004 would be able to survive a bunch of new competitors in the space. The list of companies? Netflix, TiVo, PalmSource, RIM and Vonage. While most of them are still around in one form or another, I think the only one people can safely say really maintained its innovative dominance has to be Netflix. The world changes quickly in technology.

Fifteen Years Ago:

We reported on rumors that Microsoft was working on a standalone game console two years before the Xbox was announced. We wondered if teenagers would be the wireless customers of tomorrow (yup) and were excited about a (wait for it...) CD player that would play MP3s.

The "free internet access" boom was in full swing with WorldSpy jumping into the space with a big differentiator. Unlike all its competitors, it wouldn't bombard you with ads. It just hoped that you'd be so happy with the free internet access, you'd go to its website and buy stuff. Don't think that ended up working out so well. And, yes, fifteen years ago, people were still writing idiotic articles saying that open source was "communism."

Fifty-Eight Years Ago:

We weren't publishing yet, but IBM shipped the first IBM 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a moving-head hard disk. You could lease one for just $3,200 a month (in 1957 dollars!)

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the trend-tracking dept

Five Years Ago...

This week in 2009 we (along with the rest of the web) had a lot of posts about newspapers. We asked how they could claim to be serving the public while shutting that public out with paywalls; we noted that comparing the dollar value of print and digital readers was missing the point; and we called out CNN for ripping off the reporting of others while crowing about "parasitic aggregators." We watched as news organizations fought with sports leagues over various fees for access and reporting, and mused about the possibility of sports betting as a revenue stream for US newspapers. But as the newspapers continued to call for antitrust exemptions that would allow them to put up standardized paywalls, we said fine, let them collude. See how that works out.

In non-newspaper news, we saw the federal courts condemn and then reverse their stance on RECAP, and we noted the still-new-ish trend of music publishers suing lyric sites. We also had an interview with William Patry about the state of the copyright debate, and some data from Nina Paley about her film Sita Sings the Blues.

Ten Years Ago...

2004 is the perfect year to look at to see the earth tremors that preceded today's common tech trends. Ten years ago this week, we were watching the early competition in the in-flight WiFi space, questioning the future of new online carpooling systems, and getting curious about the emerging industry of currency farming in online games. A new study discovered that IM use at work was exploding, there were renewed rumblings about a Google browser, and nobody could deny that online bullying was getting kinda scary.

We also learned that the early Mars Rovers had some problems with DOS. Oh, and the DOJ said it wasn't interested in doing Hollywood's dirty work, which hasn't turned out to be entirely true.

Fifteen Years Ago...

Of course, for the really subtle early indicators, you have to go all the way back to 1999. That's when manufacturers were still struggling with the earliest iterations of the "electronic book". It's when we were remaining skeptical about a cellphone that (gasp!) played MP3s. It's when internet addiction was a brand new idea. And it's when Techdirt, much smaller than it is today, was first mentioned in an article in Wired.

Some things don't change though. Then, as now, the flying car was just around the corner.

179 Years Ago...

The internet, as we all know, is rife with journalistic hoaxes — but such hoaxes are much older than that. One famous example comes from this week in 1835, when The Sun in New York published an elaborate series of fictional articles about the discovery of life and civilization on the moon, all falsely attributed to a notable astronomer of the day. The whole thing was both a publicity stunt to boost circulation and a sincere piece of satire targeting the wild astronomical theories being tossed around in the media at the time. Known now as The Great Moon Hoax, it also may have inspired some of Edgar Allen Poe's famous forays into proto-science-fiction.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the looking-way-way-back dept

Five Years Ago

We were wondering if it would ever be possible to implement an evidence-based approach to copyright law, rather than a faith-based approach, as there is today. It especially didn't seem likely when a top UK politician was wined and dined by entertainment industry's one week, only to propose criminalizing file sharing the next. We were also looking way, way back to the 6th Century for what was arguably the first copyright trial involving Colmcille, who might be described as the very first "book pirate." It involved arguments about whether or not one could own the words in a book and whether or not harm was done in copying it. In more modern times, we were discussing how the courts were trying to figure how to divvy up Superman's copyrights after a big copyright termination fight.

Meanwhile, we couldn't understand why everyone was so up in arms about literary homage in which someone wrote a "sequel" to classic works and wondered if it was even possible for their to be a fair trial around file sharing when so much of the language around it was inherently biased.

In the world of intellectual property abuse, Reddit was being pressured to censor news of a simple URL hack on the Sears.com website that suggested it sold grills for cooking babies, research giant Gartner was telling reporters they couldn't mention its research without permission, and book publishers were jacking up the price of ebooks, because they could. On the patent front, trolls were swooping in to patent anything and everything related to "clean tech" so they'd later be able to demand payment from the companies who did the actual work.

Finally, over in the UK, the IFPI was insisting that the Pirate Part shouldn't even be allowed to express doubts about copyright law.

Ten Years Ago:

Ten years ago this week Google went public and the long national nightmare of the bursting of the original dot com bubble was officially considered closed. Meanwhile in the big Grokster v. MGM case, Grokster won at the appeals court, agreeing with the district court that, like the Betamax, a file sharing app was just a tool, and shouldn't be blamed for infringement done by users. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court later reversed that decision by making up (out of thin air) the idea of an "inducement" standard for copyright law. Speaking of inducement, Congress was having trouble passing a law to make "inducement" a violation of copyright law (you'd think the Supreme Court would have noticed this...) and proponents of the law had handed it off to the copyright maximalists at the Copyright Office to see if they could come up with a "compromise." That compromise never came, and Congress refused to make inducing copyright infringement a form of infringement. The Supreme Court then ignored Congress and created the inducement standard by itself soon after.

There were also a whole lot of bad ideas to ban things going on ten years ago. The US was trying to ban advertisements about gambling websites, Australia was trying to ban access to online porn, the Olympics were trying to ban athletes from talking about their experiences at the Olympics online (?!?) and stores were trying to ban customers from using camera phones lest they make use of them for comparison shopping. That seemed to work out well...

Fifteen Years Ago:

One of my absolute favorite stories of the absolute insanity that was the dot com boom/bubble was when fish oil company Zapata, which was founded by George H.W. Bush, tried to totally reposition itself as an internet company known as Zap.com. The company just seemed to believe if it bought up enough early websites it could become a dot com giant of its own. 15 years ago this week, it announced plans to buy Echo, then a well known NY-based online community. Meanwhile, it appears fifteen years ago was also the first time we wrote about Elon Musk, except we were so confused we called him Elton. Sorry about that, Elton.

Fifteen years ago, we were already concerned about the rise of business method patents. We were also a bit surprised to see AT&T sue Intel over an unpaid $5,000 phone bill.

We were talking about the instant gratification economy thanks to the launch of Kozmo.com -- an idea that was apparently 15 years ahead of its time. Meanwhile, we were also quite amazed at this crazy idea of letting people broadcast MP3s from their computers to stereo speakers. The future was apparently on the way...

One Hundred And Twenty Six Years Ago

None of us were alive, but William Seward Burroughs received a patent on what was considered to be the first working "adding machine," kicking off some of what would eventually become the computer revolution. Burroughs had formed the American Arithmometer Company, which later became Burroughs Adding Machine Company, and then just Burroughs Corporation... before eventually merging with Sperry to form Unisys. Burroughs, of course, was also the grandfather of another William S. Burroughs, known for being one of the most well known beat generation writers... who named one collection of his essays The Adding Machine.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the lookin'-way-way-back dept

Five Years Ago:

An entertainment industry lawyer (who now works for the MPAA) tried to make the ridiculous argument that people disliked the RIAA because they hated the music business. We argued, in response, that it seemed a lot more likely that people hate the RIAA because of its actions, which included ripping off musicians and suing fans. But, you know, everyone's got opinions. And, of course, the fact that the RIAA was getting million dollar plus awards against people sharing two dozen songs really endeared them to the public as well. Speaking of which, the DOJ went on record saying that awards of $80,000 per song for sharing a song didn't seem all that oppressive or unconstitutional. We also had a story about how the Premier League's fear of the internet was a perfect case study in what not to do. Five years later and it's clear that the Premier League has learned... absolutely nothing.

There was some bad news on the copyright vs. innovation front as copyright was winning out. In a critical case, an appeals court overturned a lower court ruling and declared that a DVD jukebox backup system infringed on copyrights by breaking DVD DRM. This was the same week that a judge issued an injunction against another DVD copying product, RealDVD.

On the flip side, we had a story about copyright scholar William Patry pointing out the obvious: it's not copyright that creates value, but people's willingness to pay for something. This was also the introduction of Tom Bell's wonderful Mickey Mouse Curve for copyright, which continues to show up in various debates on copyright terms. There was also a really good fair use ruling, involving a book of monster movie posters, with a court ruling that the use of the posters was fair use, even though it used the entire post images and the work was a commercial effort. That ruling remains a key one for fair use based on the work being "transformative."

Guess what? The FCC was ignoring the public again. It had set up a bunch of "workshops" to discuss its national broadband plan, but nearly all of the speakers were associated with... big broadband players. Because, of course.

There were also a series of... just wacky things happening this week five years ago: Insurance company ICBC sued a website, saying it was infringing by telling people how to avoid having their claims denied. RSA threatened a guy with trademark infringement for daring to point out that the Navy Federal Credit Union website let people login from an unsecured page. RSA insisted that it was trademark infringement to claim the page wasn't secure. Yikes. On the trademark front, we had Walmart trying to abuse trademark law to shut down a union website. Big pharmaceutical companies were abusing patent law to seize and destroy legitimate generic drugs while in transit. And a very angry patent-loving guy in Oregon, nicknamed the Patent Hawk (who stops by here on occasion to hurl insults) tried to file an amicus brief in a key Supreme Court case on software patents. For reasons that still don't make sense, he filed the brief claiming it was on behalf of the entire state of Oregon, leading state officials to say they had no idea who he was and certainly didn't authorize such a brief. Meanwhile, Encyclopedia Britannica tried to abuse some patents it had covering GPS functionality, but failed (thankfully).

Ending on some good news: a court in New Hampshire said that demanding a settlement after filing a bogus lawsuit was a form of extortion. It's too bad more courts don't agree just yet. And... it's been five years since RECAP launched, saving us all a bunch of money on PACER, the electronic court docketing system -- a system that still should be free.

Ten Years Ago

We were writing about giant patent troll Acacia using a bogus patent to threaten universities that streamed content online. Meanwhile, we noted that patent battles might slow innovation in anti-spam offerings. Ten years ago, eBay ended up getting 25% of Craigslist after an early employee sold his shares. That resulted in a rather nasty legal fight four years later.

A decade ago, we wrote about a good explanation for how innovation and intellectual property didn't work well together, talking about how important it is to get ideas and information out into the world, rather than hoarding it. Also, there was a discussion by some who wondered if it could really be infringement to download TV shows that were broadcast over the air, since it would be hard to argue there was any harm at all. Of course, ten years later (in the wake of the Aereo decision and many other legal rulings) this argument seems fairly naive. But, still, there is a point there.

On the wireless front, people were arguing for much more open spectrum a fight that goes on today, while also speculating about whether or not Walmart might put wireless towers on each of its stores and create its own national wireless ISP (that didn't happen).

Fifteen Years Ago

The billions that were sunk into the global satellite phone company Iridium went up in smoke as the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Search engine AltaVista (remember them?) tried to stay hip by offering free dialup access (remember dialup?). Red Hat had its IPO. We weren't too sure about this concept known as "electronic books", but we also weren't very surprised that Microsoft Internet Explorer had been crushing Netscape, since Netscape had basically given up on improving its browser.

Seventy-two years ago

Famed actress Hedy Lamarr received US Patent 2,292,387 on a "secret communications system" that was basically spread spectrum frequency hopping -- a concept that became a key part of many important wireless technologies, including WiFi, Bluetooth and some mobile phone systems.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the a-long-way-back dept

Five Years Ago:

We were writing about (surprise!) the nuttiness of copyright laws. We had a story about a professional blues and jazz musician who was absolutely baffled by the way copyright law was getting in the way of basic creativity. Meanwhile, the Associated Press, who claimed that you had to buy a license if you quoted more than 4 words of an article was happily licensing words on which it held no copyright. Over in Congress, Rep. Zoe Lofgren was beginning to wonder why the government didn't examine if copyright laws were being used in a manner that violated anti-trust laws. And, yes, people were still getting arrested for tinkering with products they bought, because obviously that's copyright infringement (huh?).

On the trademark side, we wrote about a lawyer who had the job of watching finished movies to make sure no brands appeared anywhere in the movie unless a fee had been paid (what a job!). It was beginning to look like paid WiFi was on its death bed. The influx of parents was starting to make Facebook uncool. And, as a response to all those people claiming "well, you wouldn't want your brain surgery done by 'the crowd' so why would you trust Wikipedia," we pointed to a study saying many doctors were using Wikipedia to research things.

Finally, down in Australia, one of that country's many experiments with internet filters and censorship resulted in educational sites being blocked, while porn sites were widely available.

Ten Years Ago:

Hollywood helped put an innovative company out of business, killing off 321 Software, a company that made software to let people make backups of their DVDs. Tim Wu discovered people being turned away from an RIAA-sponsored concert, because (supposedly) bands were annoyed that cameraphone photos of the bands would show up online, without the band making any money for it (yeah, okay).

On the patent front, we were covering stories of some of the early patent trolls, while Marten Mickos wrote one of the best analogies we'd heard about software patents, referring to them as the nuclear stockpiling of the software industry. Meanwhile, Symantec got sued by a company that was upset that Symantic referred to its product as adware and a service in Malaysia was trying to let people send text messages to the driver of any car if you knew their license plate.

Fifteen Years Ago:

There were a lot of fairly bad predictions going around. Amazon was being criticized for expanding into selling consumer electronics, while investors were saying that downloadable music was a terrible idea, with a Tower Records (remember them?) exec claiming that downloadable music was a "video game". Meanwhile, we were wondering -- back in 1999 -- if the world had too many blogs (we were still calling them weblogs back then). Similarly, the NY Times thought people were crazy to waste their time scouring the internet for news articles and sharing them with people. How about that?

Meanwhile, Bill Gates had been criticized widely for many years for not donating much to charity. Fifteen years ago, he finally revealed his plans to give away most of his money -- something he's been following up on.

Twenty Three Years Ago:

We weren't publishing on the web yet, in part because this week Tim Berners-Lee revealed the details of his World Wide Web project to the world by posting it to a few Usenet groups. This is widely considered the birth of the web.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the looking-back-back-back... dept

Five Years Ago:

This was the week of the original Joel Tenenbaum trial, one of the only two (out of tens of thousands of people sued) that the RIAA actually took to court for file sharing. As we've explained, both Tenenbaum and the other defendant in the other case, Jammie Thomas Rasset, were horrible defendants who should have settled. The Tenenbaum case was a total disaster as it turns out that he flat out lied (don't do that). Even worse, his legal team was a complete trainwreck that seemed to have little real strategy. They appeared to bet the farm on a fair use defense that was always a ridiculous long shot (and I'm a big believer in fair use). When the court rejected the fair use argument right upfront, Team Tenenbaum appeared to have no real Plan B, leading to a total disaster of a trial, in which they failed to do the most basic things, like have an economic expert on hand to testify about the (lack of) damages. Given all that, it was no surprise that Tenenbaum lost and lost badly, being tagged for $22,500 per song, or a total of $675,000. The case went through various appeals, all of which failed. It was a bad case from the start and it never should have gone forward.

Meanwhile, we had a fun guest post from Amanda Palmer about how fans want to support artists. The family of a (deceased) artist in Denmark went after a town in Michigan that put up a statue very loosely based on the artist's own statue... which itself was based on a Hans Christian Anderson story. Oh, and Barnes & Noble claimed that it had to put DRM on public domain books to "protect" the copyright on them. Got it?

We had some misguided lawsuits. A company in France sued Google because Google Maps is free, and that was unfair competition. Taser, makers of the famed stungun technology, sued Second Life because someone had created a virtual Taser. Speaking of misguided: AT&T apparently blocked parts of 4chan. That's generally not a good idea.

On the patent front, this was our first mention of someone trying to claim a patent on podcasting. And we discussed how the failure of Segway to take over the world was a good demonstration of how people overvalue ideas and undervalue the execution (or, overvalue the invention and undervalue the innovation).

Meanwhile, Barry Diller declared that "free content is a myth" and so we declared that he was a myth, noting that both claims were equally accurate. And, on that note, professional troll/reporter Dan Lyons argued that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should all start charging. Because obviously that would have helped their business models.

Ten Years Ago:

People were expecting the iPhone... but they'd have to wait three more years. Instead, they got... a really crappy Motorola phone with a slimmed down version of iTunes. You may not remember it now, but it was a big deal the day it was announced, when they thought it was a fabled "iPhone." And then everyone realized it sucked. And the carriers killed it. And then everyone waited three more years. Speaking of mobile operator idiocy, we were telling them to stop locking down their phones. Seems relevant this week, seeing as President Obama officially signed into law (just yesterday) a bill to legalize (for now) phone unlocking.

Meanwhile, people were just getting used to this whole texting business, leading some to fret about how it was ruining family trips because kids spent the whole time texting. Of course, these days, texting on vacation can be kinda handy to keep tabs on folks. We were curious about the foolish people who respond to spam. An off duty cop decided to mace a couple in a movie theater for answering their phone. And the website JibJab was threatened for doing a parody of "This Land is Your Land," despite the fact that Woody Guthrie famously explained his view of copyright as follows: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Fifteen Years Ago:

Universal Pictures was threatening a site called movie-list.com for linking to their site. No joke. The site still has the rather incredible communications exchange between the two. Here's my favorite line from a lawyer at Universal:

As other Universal representatives previously explained to you, you are not permitted to link to other sites that contain our copyrighted material without our authorization. Not only is this activity another violation of our intellectual property rights, it also violates your internet service provider's terms of service.

Movie-list, for what it's worth, helped promote movies, posting their trailers and linking to the movies' own websites. Universal first demanded all the trailers be removed (which the site complied with) and then sued over the links. Perhaps even more ridiculous was the guy's ISP, who apparently freaked out when Universal contacted them. Check out this email his ISP sent to the guy who ran movie-list:

You are not a registered search engine, therefore you cannot consider yourself under the same guidelines. Universal HAS contacted us at this time. The situation is now that you must abide WHATEVER Universal insists upon. If not, we will have no choice but to suspend your site. We are bound to do so legally. Please comply with them IMMEDIATELY

Yes, back 15 years ago, it was the age when many people still thought that "deep linking" was illegal. It took until the following spring for a lawsuit to finally make it clear that linking is not infringement.

Meanwhile, this was the middle of the dot com bubble era -- and one startup was trying to IPO before it even launched because its entire business model was based on giving away its stock to users (uh, yeah). Even those crazy days, people who jumped head first into the startup game were discovering it isn't as easy as it looks. Meanwhile, Microsoft was kicking off an effort to become more well-liked in Silicon Valley (this was back in the bad old days when I didn't write very complete articles, so I never named the guy whose job it was to make Microsoft likeable, and the original article appears to be gone). Oh well.

Oh, and because some things never, ever change, we also wrote about the US government offering tax incentives to companies to provide backdoors in the encryption schemes they used.

Twenty-Five Years Ago:

We weren't publishing yet, but Robert Morris was ridiculously indicted for the Morris Worm this week. While it did take down the internet, it was never meant to be a malicious attack. Yet Morris was indicted under the (then relatively new) CFAA, becoming the first person indicted under that law. He was eventually sentenced to 400 hours of community service, 3 years of probation and a $10,050 fine -- all because his attempt to measure the size of the internet went haywire. He was the first victim of idiotic prosecutions under the CFAA, a law that still hasn't been fixed despite many others facing bogus charges. Morris went on, of course, to help found YCombinator, though he's remained mostly out of the public eye. Either way, this should be yet another reminder that it's time to reform the CFAA.

Filed Under: archives, look back