This Week In Techdirt History: December 13th - 19th

from the not-so-final dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we saw artists responding to piracy in a variety of ways. On the one hand, a comic artist was speaking out about how copyright kills culture, a musician was explaining why file sharing isn't a big deal, and an author was trying an honest and direct approach to asking pirates for support. On the other hand, a different author was slamming piracy while admitting to having a huge pirated music collection, and George Clinton (usually a supporter of remixing and sampling) surprised us all with a lawsuit against the Black Eyed Peas.

Meanwhile, the Wikileaks saga continued, and many noted that the US's reaction was doing more harm than the leaks themselves (to the point that you had to wonder if it was more about overhyping threats to pass new laws). The Congressional Research Service noted that there were serious challenges to charging Julian Assange with anything (not to mention the challenge of doing proper research on Wikileaks when access to Wikileaks is blocked). Attention was also beginning to turn towards Chelsea Manning (then still Bradley), who was being tortured by the government apparently in the hopes of securing testimony of a "conspiracy" with Assange.

Ten Years Ago

Today, product placement is a fact of life — but this week in 2005, creators in America were still hoping they could get out from under its bootheel while creators in Europe were only just beginning to experience the gathering storm. The music business was busy blaming Apple for the fact that digital download sales weren't a panacea, while Starbucks was considering its own download offerings and Google was rolling out music-focused search services. Congress was doing Hollywood's bidding in seeking to plug the analog hole, Microsoft was granted an absurd patent on pausing videos with a click, and the Supreme Court allowed CD-ROM reproductions of magazines (remember those?) as long as they are in annoying limited formats.

Since some of Sony's DRM-infected CDs were still on the shelves, one band took it up the task of recall the discs themselves. Another copy protection provider was trying a publicity stunt with a $1000 bounty to convince the world its technology was safe, though at least some people were smart enough to realize that copy protection stalls innovation.

Fifteen Years Ago

Five years before that, the idea of copy-protected CDs was a new one. This week in 2000 was the first time we heard of plans to make such CDs (and the first of many times we'd point out the inherent problems with the idea).

Also this week in 2000: Tuvalu was getting rich off the dot-TV domain deal, while technology magazines were no longer getting rich covering post-bubble Silicon Valley; electronic ink was still on the horizon though early wireless payments were becoming a reality; Walmart couldn't catch up to Amazon despite predictions, and Ask Jeeves was cleaning house with lots of layoffs; and, near the very beginning of a process that has now entirely reversed itself, the tech world was actively pushing more people to adopt Flash.

Twenty-Eight Years Ago

Square Enix is one of the most popular video game developers in the world, but back in 1987 it was still just Square — a struggling studio on the verge of bankruptcy, with no popular games under its belt. On December 18th, strongly suspecting it would be their last title ever, they released a little game called Final Fantasy for the NES. The rest, as they say, is history.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the old-and-new dept

Five Years Ago

Wikileaks, Wikileaks, Wikileaks. That was the dominant subject this week in 2010. Firstly, there were plenty of attempts to squeeze out the site through various means: though Twitter was a holdout and the White House was contradicting the Library of Congress on the subject, the Swiss bank handling Wikileaks donations found a technicality under which to freeze the account while PayPal cut off all payments. The Defense Department appeared to be blocking all sites with Wikileaks in the title, then Visa and Mastercard joined the no-more-payments-for-Wikileaks chorus (despite not having any similar issues with the KKK). This may have been because the latest leak was about them.

But, the more people tried to kill the site, the more it spread. Political pundits didn't seem to understand its distributed nature and the government didn't realize that expansionist copyright policies are what drove the development of such technology. Meanwhile, those who actually bothered to look at the cables themselves discovered plenty of things, like the expected fact that the US entertainment industry basically wrote Spain's new copyright law and the US Embassy had its fingers in Swedish copyright issues too.

Ten Years Ago

The worlds of film and television were changing rapidly this week in 2005, and some seemed to get it while others didn't. Steven Soderbergh had a good grasp on where things were and needed to be headed for films, while CNN seemed somewhat confused about offering broadcast content online. NBC made some shows available for download on iTunes, which shed some light on why they wanted to sue TiVo a few weeks earlier. Cable companies were trying to maneuver around having to offer a-la-carte channels (even though some recognized this was still just a stepping stone to unbundling the shows altogether.

Oh, and though the Sony Rootkit scandal was winding down, it wasn't over: yet another vulnerability was found and... another one too, in a patch for a previous one. Good for Sony.

Fifteen Years Ago

Still lots of analysis of the tech bubble this week in 2000. Some were trying to figure out just what caused it while others were being both optimistic and pessimistic about the future of tech (not to mention those who still thought they could assert that the internet is a passing fad). Bands were experimenting with the internet, and most people were reading too much into individual successes and individual failures. Rage Against The Machine was surprised to find people getting banned from Napster for sharing their music, since they didn't want that at all. Some people were finally taking a clear and sober look at the future of mobile music, though in general it was becoming clear that wireless was the next big thing in tech.

247 & 138 Years Ago

December 6th is a double-hit of the first publications of long-running institutions, though only one of the two still survives as of a few years ago. First, in 1768, it was the day of the publication of the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, one of three volumes that would eventually become a set costing 12 pounds sterling. Then, in 1877, it was the day the Washington Post published its first issue, which clocked in at four pages and cost three cents.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 29th - December 5th

from the unsolved-problems/mysteries dept

Five Years Ago

There were a couple major points of discussion this week in 2010. The first was the latest Wikileaks document release, which stirred ire from the president who was "considering" legal action as the DOJ tried to figure out how it could twist US law to charge Julian Assange. In the mean time, the government was putting the pressure on others to censor the site, convincing Amazon to refuse to host Wikileaks (though some pointed out Amazon seemed fine with not censoring pedophilia), telling students not to mention the site online if they wanted government jobs, and even blocking access to the site in the Library of Congress in an act of impressive denial. Of course, some were smart enough to see that this sort of freak-out was exactly the reaction Assange hoped to provoke, and that Wikileaks was not only inevitable but also critical to democracy. Even a few within the government were being rational.

The second incident was Homeland Security's sudden seizure of a bunch of domain names that were supposedly dedicated to piracy. We immediately noticed a bunch of problems with the seizures and put together a list of five important questions for Homeland Security and its ICE division. Then more problems began coming to light, like the fact that some of the seized sites were popular hip-hop blogs used by artists to promote their own music and that the entire incident pushed the law to its breaking point. While explaining/defending the seizures, ICE more or less admitted that it gets its orders directly from Hollywood.

Both these incidents had something in common, too: they showed how private intermediaries get involved in government censorship.

Ten Years Ago

There was upheaval in the world of television this week in 2005. While Americans were showing their disapproval of government regulation of TV and the telcos were struggling to offer TV of fibre and Nielsen was finally admitting DVRs were a thing, the FCC made a surprise reversal and started supporting the idea of a-la-carte cable networks. Suddenly the lines were drawn: AT&T made a strategic play in support of the idea while cable televangelists emerged as an unexpected opponent, and Cablevision stepped out of line with a maverick a-la-carte endorsement of its own.

Meanwhile, the Sony rootkit scandal continued to unfold when it turned out Sony knew about the problem before anyone noticed it. But now the list of people who had noticed it included New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Some stores still had the CDs on shelves, though it wasn't clear who was to blame, and it turned out Sony's other copy protection software was similarly evil. A look way back at the beginnings of the rootkit revealed it was begged, borrowed and stolen by desperate programmers.

Fifteen Years Ago

It was a slow week in 2000, but we did see some early glimmerings of big change, like nascent experiments with voice recognition for mobile web surfing. Some plans didn't pan out so well, like Hollywood's top secret internet distribution schemes. Reporters were discovering that their web platforms give them power as customers, and Japan was discovering that simulated dating can be a hit. This was also the week that Opera, the other other browser, announced that it would become free.

Sixty-Seven Years Ago

It's not particularly tech related, but how about a good unsolved mystery? It was on December 1st, 1948 that an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Australia, with a bunch of bizarre details surrounding the death, like a scrap of the Rubaiyat in his pocket that was then linked to a book with strange ciphers written on it. Dubbed the Taman Shud Case or the Mystery of the Somerton Man, it remains a source of speculation and mystery to this day.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 22nd - 28th

from the thanksgiven dept

Five Years Ago

The parade of horrors from the TSA continued this week, as the world continued reacting to the new enhanced security processes. One man stripped down in an attempt to avoid being groped and ended up under arrest for failing to complete the security process, while a botched pat-down left another passenger covered in urine from a broken urostomy bag. President Obama took a trip with the CEO of the company that makes the naked scanners and soon after defended the scans, while people trying to find out if the TSA had ever successfully stopped a terrorist were rebuffed in the name of national security. It was clear that the rollout of the new scanners was rushed, leaving the whole process limited in its effectiveness, but that didn't stop newspapers from snidely mocking objections to the TSA or the San Diego Airport from saying that recording the groping procedure is an arrestible offence. The TSA was even making people go through the process after their flights, but their demonstration of the groping in congress seemed to backfire, and they couldn't even keep a loaded gun magazine from being left on a plane and found by a child. The TSA's overall failure all stemmed from the same issue: the myth of perfect security.

Ten Years Ago

The fallout from the Sony rootkit fiasco was dying down this week in 2005, but it wasn't over. Texas' attorney general sued the company while the numbers showed that infected Sony CDs took a significant sales hit. One anti-virus firm came out to dispel notions that it might have colluded with Sony by explaining why it was unable to detect the rootkit sooner, and we asked a critical question: can any business based on copy protection survive?

TiVo apparently thought so, as it was expanding its offerings of content on iPods and PSPs at the cost of more robust DRM and content controls. This was a precautionary measure that didn't seem to work, as TV executives almost immediately began threatening to sue. Another new company was simply begging to be sued (though it's a shame that's the case) by selling iPods with preloaded video ripped from simultaneously purchased DVDs.

iTunes also hit an interesting milestone: it surpassed Tower Records in sales.

Fifteen Years Ago

I highlighted that last point because five years earlier, almost to the day, a study predicted that MP3s would replace CDs within five years. Of course there's lots to debate about what exactly iTunes' sales milestone meant, and what "replacing" CDs means, and so on — but it is still delightfully prophetic on the surface.

The ASIMO robot is an ongoing project that is widely known today, but it was this week in 2000 that Honda first unveiled it. Around the same time, the first self-contained bionic hand was completed in the UK. Carmakers were experimenting with driver-assisting cameras and, less glamorously, hotels were using technology to automate and secure their minibars.

Oh, and Amazon got knocked offline on Black Friday, which is some very unlucky timing.

Twenty-Eight Years Ago

Last week, we highlighted a famous authorized (but unfortunate) interruption of a broadcast signal. This week, we've got the anniversary of what is probably the most famous unauthorized intervention on the airwaves. It was on November 22nd, 1987 that a still-unidentified person dressed as Max Headroom hijacked two Chicago television stations for no immediately obvious reasons. To this day, it remains a minor mystery.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the standard-procedures dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we really saw things heat up around the TSA and its newly-introduced "backscatter" scanners and "enhanced" patdowns. One man was threatened with a lawsuit by the agency for refusing to be groped, while a woman who shared a similar story on the radio was nitpicked and accused of lying in a TSA blog post. The agency stood by its position when confronted, actively defending the techniques, and it even seemed like the public was okay with the naked scans — but it turned out that was only if you didn't mention the "naked" part. Tests were showing that similar scanners were frequently fooled by clothing, but Time Magazine was standing up for the TSA and saying the backlash was just internet hype, even as the agency was being sued by a pilot over its intrusiveness. Congress, of course, was unconcerned — perhaps because congresspeople who fly commercial get to skip the process.

Meanwhile, the COICA online censorship bill was back up for a vote in the Senate, and the MPAA's interim CEO was out defending it with false claims. Nineteen senators voted to move forward with the bill while one (Ron Wyden) was saying he'd block it.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005 was all about the fallout from the Sony rootkit fiasco. After a week of being hammered, Sony finally relented and agreed to pull the CDs from stores. This was after the "uninstaller" they released was found to open up a new security hole which, upon examination, turned out to be a really massive and stupid one. Even after Sony's too-little-too-late announcement, people continued scrutinizing the rootkit, and noticed several other things — like the fact that it contained copyright-infringing code, and that this wasn't the first mistake of this nature from Sony. The rootkit appeared to be on track to become the biggest malware of the year, and some wondered why security firms didn't catch it sooner (while others wondered if they could trust any software from Sony). By the end of the week, the company made another act of reluctant contrition, offering DRM-free MP3s to people affected by the rootkit.

Fifteen Years Ago

Back in 2000, like many other observers, Techdirt didn't catch on to just how big mobile devices were going to become. When the CEO of Ericsson suggested they'd become more popular than PCs for accessing the web, we had serious doubts; when United offered wireless flight bookings, we wondered if it was important; when Samsung created a phone that could stream video, we questioned its usefulness. Well, live and learn! It was a different time after all — when the idea of people turning up in naked photos online was new and strange, and there was a console manufacturer called "Sega" mocking its competitor, the Sony PlayStation 2.

Forty-Seven Years Ago

We all know now that standard procedure for a television network when a live sporting event runs long is to keep the cameras rolling and delay whatever else was on the schedule (well, except for a younger generation that probably only has a vague idea of what a "television network" is). But there's a first time for everything, and today's standard procedure was November 17th, 1968's sudden and unexpected disaster: the infamous "Heidi Game", when the dramatic conclusion to a Raiders-Jets game (with the latter scoring two last-minute touchdowns to turn the game around) was cut from the airwaves in favor of Heidi, a made-for-TV movie adaptation of a 19th-century Swiss novel. Fans were unimpressed, and indeed nobody thought this was a good idea, but since nobody had thought about it in advance, the long-running game caused utter chaos, as Wikipedia summarizes:

...[NBC executives Connal and Cline] agreed the game would not end on time. Both supported running the end of the game, but given [NBC President] Goodman's instructions, his permission was required. Connal agreed to call NBC Sports president Lindemann, and that he and Lindemann would then speak to Goodman. After promising Cline a return call, Connal reached Lindemann by telephone. Lindemann agreed that the end of the game should be broadcast, and both men began trying to reach Goodman. Lindemann was successful in reaching Goodman, and asked the network president, "What about the instruction to broadcast operations control that Heidi had to go on at 7:00 ET, no matter what?" Goodman replied, "That's crazy. It's a terrible idea." Lindemann then set up a three-way conversation with himself, Goodman and NBC Television president Don Durgin. After several minutes of discussion, Durgin agreed to delay the start of Heidi until after the game was completed. ...

Cline, watching the clock nervously, attempted to call Connal back, only to find both lines busy. He waited as long as he could, then made one final, unsuccessful attempt. Unknown to Cline, Connal was talking to Goodman, who had agreed to "slide the network", that is, start Heidi as soon as Curt Gowdy signed off from the game. Connal called the game producer, Ellis, in Oakland, to tell him the news, then called the BOC [Broadcast Operations Control] supervisor in Burbank – who, not knowing Connal, refused his order, and insisted on speaking with Goodman directly. As Goodman had disconnected to allow Connal to call Oakland, this could not be done.

Beginning about 6:45, many members of the public began calling NBC network and affiliate switchboards. Some demanded the game be shown to its conclusion; others wanted to know if Heidi would start on time. These calls jammed the switchboards, and even blew repeated fuses in them, preventing the executives from getting through to each other to resolve the situation. NBC protocol required an operations order from Connal, to countermand the midweek written orders, but Cline received no call from the increasingly desperate Connal, who was frustrated by the switchboard issues. Without such an order, and not knowing of Goodman's approval, Cline made the decision that Heidi would start on time.

Today, television networks have what's colloquially known as a "Heidi phone" — a dedicated line for just such situations, to prevent that mess from ever happening again (though I imagine this has been replaced by or supplemented with even more reliable instant communication by now, too).

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the long-strange-trip dept

Five Years Ago

Let's start out on the patent front. This week in 2010, the USPTO issued new guidelines that made it harder to reject patents for obviousness, while MIT's tech review disappointingly came out in favor of patent trolls. Microsoft and Motorola got entangled in a full-scale patent war, while patents intersected with actual war when South Korea tried to use them to stop North Korea from copying its uniforms. Facebook also filed its first patent lawsuit — a countersuit against a patent aggressor.

Meanwhile, in the game of piracy whac-a-mole, we saw a bunch of LimeWire replacements start popping up after the shutdown, including new unofficial versions of LimeWire itself — leading to the supremely ironic situation of LimeWire complaining about unauthorized copies. Cooler heads, however, were discussing the bigger picture: the EU Commissioner was telling copyright middlemen to get with the times, musician Phil Elverum (who I've seen live twice — once in a church, and once quite literally in a tree) was urging musicians to let music be free and sell valuable scarcities, and one law professor was using hip-hop as a case study in why copyright laws badly need to be updated.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, the world was still in the wake of the Sony rootkit scandal. Despite the PR disaster, the company was still pursuing new copy protection schemes, while we looked towards the class action lawsuit that was in the works. The company's response was feeble and insulting, claiming that rootkits weren't a big deal because most people don't know what they are, and the EFF took a look at Sony's EULA only to discover a clause saying that if you declare bankruptcy, you must delete the music. Unsurprisingly, virus writers started using the widespread rootkit to their advantage and to cover up their work, and by the end of the week Sony had finally agreed to stop making and distributing rootkits... temporarily.

Fifteen Years Ago

Groups like Anonymous have become well known in recent years, but "hacktivism" has roots going all the way back to this week in 2000, when website defacement and DOS attacks were in their infancy and not always very effective. Of course, the best "DDOS" of the time was a natural one: the presidential election generated enough traffic to knock out a bunch of political websites.

We also saw one of the silliest events in the Napster war this week in 2000: the RIAA sent a letter to Napster requesting that they issue a personal apology to Lars Ulrich, as if (as we put it at the time) he was "5 years old and crying in the corner because some other kid took his toys". But perhaps it was foolish to expect anything more mature.

Also in 2000: a lot of things sucked, like mobile phone service and search engines and online banking and voice recognition and many aspects of shopping online. You can decide for yourself how far each of those things has come...

Ninety-Three Years Ago

The BBC is one of the most respected public broadcasters in the world, but what not everyone knows is that before it become the Crown-controlled "British Broadcasting Corporation" it had a brief four-year stint of life as the privately-owned "British Broadcasting Company". It was on November 14th, 1922 that it began mediumwave broadcasts from the Marconi House in London and aired the first BBC newscast, and on November 15th that it launched two additional channels in Manchester and Birmingham.

Filed Under: history, look back

Techdirt Reading List: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg To Gates

from the the-pirates-go-way-back dept

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

This week, we've got a massive tome of a book in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns. Weighing in at over 600 pages, this is a highly readable and entertaining look at the fact that the whole concept of "intellectual property piracy" (as much of a misleading term as that may be) didn't just start with the rise of the internet, but has been going back centuries.

This book really helps put into perspective the fights over the past few years, and shows how these battles concerning the freedom of information and knowledge go back pretty much since the dawn of the ability to create "content" in some fixed form. Even better, it also highlights how over and over and over again, what starts out as "piracy" actually turns out to be key innovations that drives the whole world of culture forward. It's the kind of perspective that is sorely needed -- but frequently lacking -- from debates over the topic. While I've been familiar with many historical examples of fights over "infringement," this book took my knowledge and understanding to new levels. It's packed with useful information.

Filed Under: adrian johns, history, intellectual property, piracy, reading list, techdirt reading list

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

from the things-change dept

Five Years Ago

First, one of the most notable events of this week in 2010: a proposal started making the rounds in the EU, calling for a newly conceived right to be forgotten. What ever happened with that?

Meanwhile, we saw plenty of copyright clashes: a reality show was sued for copying its premise from another show (shocking!), a YouTube star was silenced because apparently parody isn't fair use, and online radio was being stymied across the board by the DMCA. At least it was nice to see the librarians of Brazil state that copyright is a fear-based reaction to open knowledge, while Lawrence Lessig was pointing out to the WIPO that copyright was not designed for an age when every use is a copy.

In the world of patents, we were surprised to see the DOJ come out against isolated gene patents (which did not make the USPTO very happy at all). But there was still plenty of room for patent abuse, what with the chief CAFC judge ignoring the negative side of patents and Colgate trying to patent a traditional tooth-cleaning powder that was thousands of years old.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005 was when the tech world was rocked by the Sony rootkit scandal. First, the nefarious copy protection scheme on Sony CDs was discovered, sparking off a firestorm of reaction. Then it became clear that the rootkit opened up a huge security hole that others could piggyback on. Then some people noticed that other companies were doing similar things. Sony promised to "fix" the problem, but not by actually letting you uninstall the "copy protection", and then people noticed that the patch contained a bunch of other questionable stuff, and sometimes crashed Windows. Nobody was impressed, and the fallout plagues Sony to this day, deservedly so. You'd think this might put a damper on the entertainment industry's enthusiasm for DRM, but of course this was the same week Hollywood started seeking to plug the "analog hole" (though thankfully Congress didn't seem very interested).

Fifteen Years Ago

There was plenty of the usual 2000 stuff this week: dot-coms may or may not have been failing, tech incubators were struggling, spam was everywhere, much like tech conferences, and so on... But the most interesting tidbit is one that reminds us of something it's often easy to forget: copyright was not always a central topic of Techdirt, and the blog was not an ongoing participant in that debate. Thus, when the Copyright Office announced its support of a law to prevent the circumvention of copy protection, Mike noted that "I don't follow this stuff as closely as many people do" and made only a simple comment about how anti-circumvention seems nonsensical from a security point of view. Oh how things have changed!

Forty-Seven Years Ago

Around here, we mostly talk about the MPAA for its ongoing Sisyphean war against piracy — but to most people, it's best known for the voluntary rating system on movies (which has its own host of problems). Well, it was on November 1st, 1968 that the voluntary ratings came into effect, replacing the Hays Code (which also had its own host of other problems, but that's another story).

Filed Under: history, look back

Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing

from the into-the-memory-hole dept

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the "Chronicling America" contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright's legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it.

Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it's the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages.

The result is what's been dubbed "The Missing 20th Century," after it was brought to light by the striking research of Paul Heald, which shows copyright restrictions are tightly correlated with the lack of commercial availability of books. He analyzed the titles available in Amazon's warehouses to find a steep drop-off in titles first published after 1923, which carries through until just the last few years. As Heald's research shows, the number of books available from the 1850s is double the number available from 1950.

Despite what advocates of copyright term extensions like to say, the data suggests that after the first few years of a book's publication, publishers as a group are much less willing to print a text that's under copyright than one in the public domain.

The situation with newspapers is worse. After all, while books may tend to see their value to readers taper off after a few years after publication, for newspapers that same tapering happened in just days. Today's newspaper issue may be incredibly valuable in the right hands, but yesterday's is more likely to line bird cages or wrap fish than to end up preserved for posterity.

The big players keep their own archives. The New York Times, for example, makes articles available dating back to 1851. But that's an incomplete solution for two major reasons. For one thing, it sets up a single point of failure that could allow catastrophic losses. Just last month, flooding threatened a priceless collection of photos in the New York Times archive; had those images been digitized and widely copied, no single flood or fire would pose a risk. But also, even a robust archive from a major publication like the Times can't provide the kinds of insights that come from looking at a diverse collection from multiple different sources.

In the world of media journalism, we talk a lot about the future. But we can't have a coherent conversation about that without thinking about the past and the present. And those thoughts, in turn, rely on access to the history that we've allowed to be locked up under effectively unlimited copyright restrictions or as orphan works.

Because this issue is bigger than the entries into a particular contest, or the way today's history students can explore the past. The Atlantic documented last month the near-total disappearance of a groundbreaking series of investigative journalism from just eight years back. If copyright continues to jeopardize the unrestricted ability of archivists and researchers to preserve and contextualize our history, how much will we lose?

Filed Under: archives, chronicling america, copyright, copyright terms, history, journalism, missing 20th century

This Week In Techdirt History: October 25th - 31st

from the happy-halloween! dept

Five Years Ago

Since we're talking about history, let's start with the end of an era: it was this week in 2010 that Sony officially stopped making the cassette Walkman, which was surprising news since most people didn't realize it was still making them.

In the world of ACTA, the US more or less said that it would ignore anything it doesn't like, while a group of prominent law professors urging the president to halt his endorsement of the agreement and the government in India was asking questions about how it effects other trade agreements. Some countries were barrelling ahead with their own IP plans: France's HADOPI was sending out 25,000 first strike notices every day, Korea was kicking people offline under its recent new copyright regime, and Denmark was secretly working on a three strikes plan of its own.

And again on the subject of history, we saw some preservation efforts after another recent end-of-an-era moment: a huge archive of sites from the recently-closed Geocities was released as a 1TB torrent for anyone to download.

Ten Years Ago

Not that much has changed, but back in 2005 it was still trendy to bash the internet for all sorts of silly reasons. This week, we saw Forbes publish an article bashing blogs for not being real journalism, and our old friend Nicholas Carr took up the mantle of attacking and belittling all the amateur content to be found online, with a flimsy focus on Wikipedia. TV networks, at least, were starting to hesitantly embrace the need for change (though as often as not, they screwed it up).

Meanwhile, the internet was bracing itself further for the ever-growing onslaught of spam, while some were getting creative in spamming themselves, like the company that mass-emailed its competitors clients after the competitor accidentally revealed their emails, or the UK government's plan to spam the people with direct marketing messages, or the apparent trend of recruiting college kids to spam their friends in person.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, we saw the first baby steps of Google's metamorphosis into an advertising juggernaut as the company starting selling keyword-based search ads. Similarly, we took a peek at the early clues suggesting Linux's future dominance — not as a desktop replacement, but as an OS filling all sorts of ubiquitous computing niches. (Little did we know Android would come along and connect these two things closely — at the time, Nokia was the king of wireless).

In these innocent early days of the internet, people were still struggling with questions like "is it email or e-mail?" and "should I rearrange my home for my computer?" (though that last one was a little unclear...) The still-raging battle about whether the internet isolates people was in full force, and perhaps the only thing anyone could say with certainty is that predictions are difficult (and a lot of futurists are kind of silly).

Forty-Two Years Ago

Not all technical achievements are digital, and this week we mark one that was decidedly old-fashioned — in fact, it's something that has been dreamed of for 2500 years, since Darius I of Persia achieved a prototypical version by stringing a bunch of boats together. Since those days of antiquity, rulers have wished they could bridge the Bosphorous Strait in modern-day Turkey, the great and only link between Europe and Asia (unless you have a lot of seafaring vessels or feel like marching through Russia over the Caucusus). It was on October 30th, 1973 that this feat was first truly achieved with the completion of the Bosphorous Bridge, which at the time of its construction was the fourth-longest suspension bridge in the world and the longest outside the United States. It's since been joined by a second bridge across the historic strait, with a third set to open soon. Alexios Komnenos would be jealous.

Filed Under: history, look back