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

from the looking-down dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we saw lots of fights about various kinds of online behavior. The University of Calgary was told by a court that it can't sanction students for their Facebook comments, while the University of Kentucky's decision to ban a student newspaper from its sporting events was just begging for a legal challenge; Google was ordered to reveal the IP addresses of a bunch of mean YouTube commenters, while an infamous police officer from the G20 protests in Toronto was seeking to force them to do the same thing for him and a Broadway actor was starting the same crusade against Twitter; the owner of an anti-Ryanair website was forced to hand over his domain because he made a little bit of money, while the owner of a bedbug-tracking website was facing threats from angry hotel owners; one court rejected probation terms that banned a teenager from social networks, while another allowed criminal charges for violating Ticketmaster's terms of service to move forward (and a Supreme Court justice admitted he doesn't read EULAs and other fine print). Oh, and Gene Simmons decided it was time to somehow put Anonymous in jail.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, we tried to figure out just what Rupert Murdoch's plan was for all the online media he was buying up, because it didn't really seem like he had one, though smarter online news businesses were realizing that the technology doesn't just change the medium, but the whole approach to reporting the news. Also in the list of things that needed (and still need) an entirely revamped approach: intellectual property.

Also in 2005: India joined the list of countries objecting to Google Earth while a tragedy for its neighbor Pakistan demonstrated the good that satellite photos can do; anti-video-game-violence crusader Jack Thompson bailed on a challenge he issued to create a game for him while we wondered whether (serious, real) challenge competitions are the best way to jumpstart research; Netflix pretty much gave up on its plans to offer movie downloads because of licensing issues and, in other news that surprised nobody, it turned out tech companies in general are magnets for lawsuits.

Fifteen Years Ago

By this week in 2000, the dot-com bust was a reality nobody could shut up about, so everyone had to get in on saying wise (read: obvious) things about it. Some were listing out their reasons for the bubble and its bursting as though nobody knew, some were cataloguing the "lessons learned" as though they weren't entirely clear, and some were reiterating investment fundamentals as though they were new ideas. Cooler heads were pointing out that the markets as a whole weren't so bad; others were taking a look at the fallen VCs of the Valley; and some were showering dot-coms with sympathy in the form of free advertising. Did the bust mean the tech industry was out of ideas? For the answer to that, see the past fifteen years.

Sixty-Nine Years Ago

Today, we have a wealth of photos of the earth from space, in stunning high resolution and in almost every set of conditions imaginable. But it was all the way back on October 24th, 1946 that a V-2 rocket launched from New Mexico and returned bearing the very first photo of the earth from space that human beings would ever see:

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the don't-panic dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, the ACTA saga continued. We noted how the text cleverly upgraded non-commercial filesharing to criminal infringement, while Senator Wyden asked the Congressional Research Service to look into how much ACTA would impact US law (and KEI stepped up to highlight some of the inevitable conflicts themselves). The BSA was falsely claiming that the treaty had already been signed by 37 countries (real tally: zero) while Brazil joined the chorus of nations that were condemning ACTA altogether. As for the US, we simply asked the question of whether it was at all realistic to except US officials to ditch the agreement.

Copyright settlement shakedown operations were continuing their triumphant rise in America, to the point that they even came into conflict when Media Copyright Group and US Copyright Group had a trademark dispute, leading us to notice that these firms actually copy each other a lot. On the flipside, we saw a former music industry executive stand up in favor of lower prices, and were especially shocked to find the RIAA sort-of endorsing an opt-in copyright system.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, Apple unveiled its first video-capable iPod, and we brought up how it had been the recording industry's obsession with DRM that made Apple so powerful — unsurprisingly with all sorts of expensive proprietary content (somewhat surprisingly in partnership with Disney). And rather than being able to put content on it from your DVR, Dish thought it would be helpful to release its own line of portable video players for that purpose.

Meanwhile, the world was coming to terms with the fact that CAN-SPAM had been a failure at stopping spam online, succeeding only in pushing it off-shore and letting the scammers keep scamming — but for some reason that didn't stop people from wanting to try the exact same tactic with spyware.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, we got a look at how the dot-com bubble burst extended beyond Silicon Valley and was impacting Europe (where London was the technology capital) as well — though Intel's CEO was baffled by a lot of the panic and some people suggested it might be a great time to buy ecommerce stocks. Meanwhile, the internet continued to clash with traditional businesses in new ways: franchises were hitting all sorts of obstacles, online bill paying was failing to catch on, the funeral industry was moving online in a big way, companies were realizing that their offline ad sales team and sell online ads too, and one online bank was getting ready to open brick-and-mortar locations. And of course, failed startup Boo.com discovered a new revenue stream by publishing a book about their failure.

Thirty-Six Years Ago

I know we've got plenty of fans amongst our readership, so it seems worth noting: October 12th was the anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which sold 250,000 copies in its first three months.

Filed Under: history, look back

Digital Orphans: The Massive Cultural Black Hole On Our Horizon

from the wake-up dept

Imagine you are a researcher in 2050, researching the history of the Black Lives Matter movement. But you've stumbled across a problem: almost every Tweet, post, video or photograph with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that you want to use in your work is an orphan work (i.e., works whose owners are impossible to track down, but are still covered by copyright). You'd like to ask permission but all you've got to go on are usernames from defunct accounts. Where do you go from here?

Last week, the Copyright Office accepted responses to its Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. (Full disclosure, I represented the Internet Archive in this proceeding, but all views here are my own). But that Report has no answers for our hypothetical researcher; it doesn't once mention or consider the question of what we are going to do about the billions of orphan works that are being "born digital" every day.

Instead, the Copyright Office proposes to "solve" the orphan works problem with legislation that would impose substantial burdens on users that would only work for one or two works at any given time. And because that system is so onerous, the Report also proposes a separate licensing regime to support so-called "mass digitization," while simultaneously admitting that this regime would not really be appropriate for orphans (because there's no one left to claim the licensing fees). These proposals have been resoundingly criticized for many valid reasons.

Another reason to add to the pile is that it is exclusively focused on analog orphans -- books, photographs and other materials in physical formats gathering dust in small local library collections or arcane institutional collections. These materials are culturally important, and scholars have shown that many have fallen into a 20th-Century digital black hole. But the black hole that could engulf digital orphans is poised to be ultramassive in comparison.

Each day, billions of photos are uploaded to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Flickr and What's App. Similarly, 400 hours of video per minute are uploaded to YouTube alone. While some professionals use these platforms commercially to exploit their creative work, the vast majority of today's copyright owners probably don't even know what copyright is. They are simply documenting and sharing their lives. Look, for example, to the rise in popularity of social video sharing services such as SocialCam, Vid.me, Periscope, and Meerkat.

Most of the content online today is created by amateurs. Much of it is also created anonymously or pseudonymously, with no real name attached to the account. And the vast majority of users of these platforms are under 35. To make matters worse, as new services become popular, users will inevitably move on, leaving their accounts inactive. What will become of the photos, blog posts, videos and other content that is posted online every day -- much of it being created by teenagers with no interest or expectation of commercial exploitation -- that will be left behind on these platforms? Copyright law will protect those works for 70 years after these prolific teenagers die.

We are looking down the barrel of a serious crisis in terms of society's ability to access much of the culture that is being produced and shared online today. As many of these born-digital works become separated from their owners, perhaps because users move on to newer and cooler platforms, or because the users never wanted their real identity associated with this stuff in the first place, we will soon have billions upon billions of digital orphans on our hands. If those orphans survive the various indignities that await them -- host platforms going under, being deleted for more server space -- we are going to need a way to think about digital orphans. They clearly will not need to be digitized so the Copyright Office's mass digitization proposal would not apply. However, the public deserves access to the cultural heritage being amassed on digital platforms.

It might be easy to dismiss these concerns, to say that there's little social value in much of the content being created by amateurs. But I suspect researchers and historians of the future will beg to differ.

New technologies have already allowed us to develop whole new systems of communication that have no non-digital equivalent, no physical record: hashtags, emoji, reaction .gifs, LoLcats, just to name a few. Remember the Occupy Movement? And the "we are the 99%" meme? People often told their personal economic stories by holding up a handwritten sign in a photograph that would be posted to Twitter or Tumblr. Any understanding of the consequences of the economic collapse of the late 2000s would be incomplete without this digital context.

The means for creating extremely rich records of our daily lives are everywhere. People are voluntarily and enthusiastically documenting big events and small moments. Technology platforms are now places of record, although they are not necessarily designed as such. Our very way of knowing about ourselves as a society will be shaped by the sorts of access we will have to these digital records, not only of major political events like elections, but also of everyday life.

We need to start thinking about these digital orphans today, before we have a culture crisis on our hands. Perhaps this should be our call to rethink the broken policies that created the orphan works problem in the first place: extremely long terms and lack of formalities. Perhaps we could pass legislation that would establish a safe harbor for those who rely in good faith on rights information available in the Copyright Office's registration database. Perhaps fair use will evolve to allow full public access to orphans.

Of course any solution will also have to manage the significant privacy issues that will pervade these works as well, but that's a problem for another article. But anything as burdensome as the Copyright Office's current proposal will be woefully inadequate to handle the staggering numbers of born-digital orphans in the future.

Lila Bailey is a copyright attorney practicing in the Bay Area. She also teaches Internet Law at Berkeley Law.

Filed Under: copyright, history, orphan works, research, social media

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

from the tick-tock dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, the ACTA negotiations were nearing completion, prompting EU Parliament members to speak out even louder about their objections to the deal and the Mexican Senate to vote unanimously to withdraw from the negotiations entirely. Though officially nobody but the negotiators were supposed to have seen the agreement text, nobody was surprised when the MPAA voiced its approval of the current deal. When the draft text was finally released, it was bad, and we pointed out how that was inevitable considering they didn't talk to key stakeholders — but the negotiators continued with their line that secrecy was vital (and turned off the WiFi at a briefing about the draft).

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch's advertisers were bailing on his paywalled news sites while the Boston Globe was celebrating its own paywall with a column full of logical fallacies, and the Knight Foundation was bizarrely funding even more paywalls. Cory Doctorow (who has a way better nose for business models) was explaining why free doesn't bother him, and the world was realizing just how much money Minecraft was raking in.

Ten Years Ago

In 2005, the Wall Street Journal was a paywall pioneer, and getting ready to raise its online subscription prices, not for the first time. The BBC, on the other hand, was realizing that its role in news had to evolve and change, and focused on becoming a facilitator.

A new study suggested that file-sharing is good for digital music sales, but that didn't stop Macrovision from trying to convince entertainment companies they really need more copy protection software (which Macrovision made). The industry was trying a new (and stupid) approach by insisting that fair use harms innovation, while we were offering the more likely explanation for their behaviour: innovating is hard, but suing people is easy. The RIAA was gearing up to go after satellite radio, while the most egregious incident comes from France, where the operator of a lyrics website got six months in jail.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, it was still a time to analyze Silicon Valley in the midst of the dot-com flux. One study suggested that dot-com execs don't actually fit the stereotype most people have in mind, though the public sex that broke out at a big dot-com party diluted that message a bit. More important was determining which dot-coms were running out of money — and for some, that became a way to make money in and of itself (while for others it was the sign of a coming internet depression).

Six-Hundred And Five Years Ago

This week we celebrate the makers of the Medieval era by marking the October 9th birthday of the Prague Orloj aka the Prague Astronomical Clock. Actually, nobody knows its precise birthday, just the first time it was mentioned in writing in 1410 — but it's a marvel of early engineering, the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest that is still ticking away today.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 27th - October 3rd

from the from-gnu-to-coica dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we saw lots of action around COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. Firstly, we took a look at all the past technologies that would have been blocked by the bill and what it might censor in the future, while Tim Berners-Lee himself came out against it. Of course, the RIAA was claiming that failure to pass COICA would put Americans at risk. Just in case the bill didn't pass, the White House was working on a backup internet censorship plan — and then, finally, the bill was shelved. Some people turned their attention to smarter ways of thinking about copyright law, but that's not always easy in a world where the press could barely tell the difference between copyright and patents. Plenty of others were sticking with stupidity, from the garden-variety claim that "copyleft" supporters think music should only be a hobby to the more fiery assertion that file-sharers are going to hell. We tried our best to note that embracing 'free' doesn't mean making no money, and asked whether even uncompensated commercial use of an artist's work is really all that bad. Certainly it's not as bad as a British city council abusing copyright to stop meetings from going up on YouTube.

Ten Years Ago

Five years earlier in 2005, not much was different. We pointed out how stupid most attempts at making new IP laws were, and that the real way to combat piracy is with innovation, not legislation. But one California senator was convinced that laws could put an end to file sharing, while the Canadian recording industry was trying to convince people that file sharing is a gateway to a life of crime. Much better to piss off customers with copy protection then pretend it was a mistake, or attack the developers making your device better, or attempt to wow the world by making flash storage less useful with copy protections). We did see one great idea, though: Ed Felten proposed the "pizzaright" principle, wherein you evaluate arguments for stronger IP protections by imagining them as a monopoly on delivering pizza in certain market.

Fifteen Years Ago

Let's head back five years earlier still, where everything was... pretty similar. Last week, we noted that The Offspring was planning to release its album online in 2000 — and this week, Sony put an end to their innovation. Capital Records tried to pass itself off as embracing file sharing, but the details were disappointing and mostly meaningless. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that it's not just kids who wanted downloadable music and that respect for intellectual property actually correlated with poor education.

Also this week in 2000: Volvo launched a car that was only advertised online and Fosters (the beer company) was going digital with care and forethought; the convergence of phones and PDAs was still messy but clearly on the horizon, even though mobile internet still had very limited appeal; companies were realizing the dangers of using a phone while driving, it was discovered that (gasp!) some people use public internet kiosks for crime, and Shanghai decided to just start shutting down internet cafes entirely.

Thirty-Two Years Ago

The GNU project remains controversial in some circles, and even here at Techdirt we've often pushed back against some of its more extreme proponents, but I don't think there's any denying that it has had a huge and overall very positive impact on the world of computing. It was on September 27th, 1983 that Richard Stallman first announced the GNU Project on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups. A few months later, Stallman quit his job at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (so they couldn't claim any sort of ownership) and began developing free software.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: September 20th - 26th

from the from-broadsheets-to-broadband dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we saw lots of people trying to manipulate existing laws to their advantage, and lots of others trying to get new laws in place. The ISP Suddenlink rolled out a homegrown three-strikes policy and claimed the DMCA required it, while Intel was threatening to weaponize the DMCA against anyone who used a readily-available HDCP crack. The MPAA was exploring the possibility of using ACTA to get broad censorship powers, while some senators were proposing a bill that would let the Justice Department censor "pirate sites" worldwide, even while one among them was aggressively opposing internet censorship by other countries and President Obama was speaking out against online censorship in general. Amidst this, we took a look at the serious due process concerns with such censorship.

In an early prototype to the Aereo battle, Seattle company ivi was trying out its own broadcast-TV-online service, and facing opposition. Some creators were at least trying to embrace online distribution, with a group of Swedish filmmakers releasing their movie in theaters and on the Pirate Bay at the same time and Richard Dawkins pointing a fan to the Pirate Bay as a source for his new documentary.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, people were asking the big perennial digital question: does technology make us smarter? (Short answer: not really.) On the flipside, some were looking at the effects of technology withdrawal. Google was being accused of "dumbing down" its search by making it smarter and easier to use (but was also busy being sued by the Author's Guild over its book scanning project).

Grokster was pretty freaked out by the recent Supreme Court ruling against it and hoping to sell out to a "legit" file sharing service, while Hollywood was gearing up to waste millions of dollars trying to develop better copy protection — which felt a lot like Hollywood calling its own bluff. The IFPI released some malware that deletes file-sharing applications, while at least one judge smartly recognized that the RIAA can't sue parents for stuff their kids do online. But perhaps they could be blamed for buying their kids banned video games and demonstrating to the people of New Zealand how futile such bans are.

Fifteen Years Ago

Of course, by 2005 it should have been obvious that the anti-file-sharing crusade was futile: this same week in 2000 Bill Gurley was underlining how utterly impossible it is to stop sharing, while sharing gets easier and easier and Forrester was reporting on how all these lawsuits are a waste of time. The Rio was fresh off its copyright victory against the RIAA, but that victory was starting to look Pyrrhic.

As for new and emerging technologies, we saw plenty of interesting things: glow-in-the-dark rabbits made with jellyfish DNA, the coming age of robots, and the earliest rumbles of in-flight WiFi. Ray Kurzweil was making some very optimistic predictions about the future, while some non-profit groups were running aggressive anti-technology media campaigns. Overall, we were trying to determine the internet's impact on all sorts of things, from mom and pop shops to economic theory as a whole.

Three-Hundred And Twenty-Five Years Ago

The history of American newspapers starts with single-page broadsheets, but it was on September 25th, 1690 that they took a step towards a major evolution with the release of the first multi-page newspaper published in the Americas. It came out of Boston and had a gloriously dated name: Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick.

It was supposed to be published monthly "or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener" — but British colonial authorities shut it down only four days later. Or, in their words, they did "hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in; strickly forbidden any person or persons for the future to Set forth any thing in Print without License first obtained from those that are or shall be appointed by the Government to grant the same."

(Yes, even censorship orders sound cooler in 17th-century English.)

Filed Under: history, look back

Techdirt Reading List: The Worldly Philosophers

from the economic-history 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 help support Techdirt. When I talk to people who are interested in the concept of economics, but never really got into the specifics, I often suggest they pick up and read (or at least skim) The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, by Robert Heilbroner. It's not an economics text by any means, but rather a highly readable and interesting look at some of the earliest economists, their lives and philosophies. At least one friend told me after reading this book that he finally realized that economics is not boring -- and isn't just about numbers, graphs and charts -- but rather really is a form of philosophy.

There have been some criticisms of The Worldly Philosophers over the years -- including that Heilbroner inserts his own viewpoint and opinions into it, and sometimes focuses on creating a good story over a fully accurate representation of the individuals covered in the book. That may be true, but I'm not convinced it really matters that much. The book is not a full and thorough scholarly work or biography about these individuals, but is (in my opinion) a great way to think about the concept of economics itself and how it developed, while learning a bit about the original characters who created the field.

Filed Under: economics, history, reading list, robert heilbroner, techdirt reading list, worldly philosophers

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

from the long-road dept

Five Years Ago

There was lots of back-and-forth in the copyright debate this week in 2010. Vandals bass player Joe Escalante attacked the public domain as "communism" that will destroy classical music (perhaps he didn't know how many wonderful works the public was missing out on), while John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls was admitting to using LimeWire and preferring a fan-made music video for one of their songs to the official one. Filmmaker Bevin Carnes went on an anti-free-culture rant and insisted that only creators who rely on copyright are qualified to talk about it, so conveniently the famous director Jean-Luc Godard was at the same time saying he doesn't believe in intellectual property, and donating to an MP3 downloader's defense. A spokesperson for the Canadian music industry was claiming user generated content supports piracy, while Rep. Darrell Issa was worrying that stricter copyright laws are restricting innovation. Amidst all this, we looked at some bigger ideas: why it's so important not to call infringement "theft", and how realizing that copyright restricts free speech opens your eyes to all sorts of problems. One good example happened in Russia, where officials were abusing copyright law to intimidate critics with the help of Microsoft, who rapidly backed down after being called out.

Ten Years Ago

In 2005, Napster was desperately trying to convince people its legal service was awesome (while music-losing iTunes crashes were making users wonder about that service too), the RIAA was over-touting its incomplete victory in the Grokster case, and Taiwan was sending file-sharing execs to jail.

Dell was trying (futilely) to compete with the iPod while ABC was partnering with a VoIP provider to offer an almost comically unappealing newscast service. Mobile content was still a tough game in 2005, with even the content creators doing very little consuming, and most consumers not being sure what things like 3G and VoIP actually are (though we wondered why they really should). The usage data that did exist was teaching us some rather obvious things, like the fact that people prefer breaking news on their phones, rather than old news.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, we saw some of the earliest examples of big artists drifting away from their labels and towards the web: the Smashing Pumpkins released their latest album exclusively online as a free MP3 download, and The Offspring was doing the same (minus the exclusive part) while experimenting with reason-to-buy perks for big fans. Meanwhile, Courtney Love was suing Universal for a cut of its award in the MP3.com case, to test the claims that it was all about helping out musicians.

We also saw the first glimmers of lots of new technologies, some of which have become ubiquitous since while others still struggle. Long before Siri, Palm was looking into bringing speech recognition to PDAs — but in the form of remote interaction by phone. The idea of wireless location services was new and exciting, but with a lot of potential for early overhype. Beyond voice, people were also experimenting with gesture recognition and of course direct brain interfaces. Then there were the folks who, way back in 2000, were already trying to let you hail a cab with the press of a button on your phone.

Thirty Years Ago

On September 13th, 1985, before Techdirt began (and just less than a month after I began, incidentally) a legend was born: Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Family Computer/FAMICOM in Japan. Later that year it would come to America, and three decades later the company would finally release a level building tool.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the bug-or-feature dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we got another look at ACTA when the latest draft leaked and, as expected, it was mostly bad news. So bad, in fact, that a majority of EU Parliament members signed a declaration against it, though it wasn't clear at the time if that would make any difference. At the same time, emails released under a FOIA request gave us a closer look at just how much the USTR pushed to keep ACTA as secret as possible.

Craigslist was under attack, and caved this week by shutting down its Adult Services section (and replacing it with a black bar that read "censored"). Some people, at least, were beginning to stand up and point out that forcing Craigslist to do this actually helps the criminals it's supposed to stop, but the anti-Craigslist "public interest" groups kept up their ongoing media attacks. Of course the real source of the attacks was Attorneys General, especially Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal who, it turned out, didn't even have jurisdiction over prostitution.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2005, still two years away from the first iPhone, Motorola released its much-hyped "iTunes Phone" — and it sucked. At this time, the market for smartphones still hadn't been carved out by the well-designed iPhone, and most people simply didn't want phones with lots of features (or just didn't know it yet), nor were they sure why they really needed a mobile data plan, and the future of mobile music downloads looked bleak. Of course all this renewed conversation and speculation around the possibility of a real Apple-made "iPhone", while the company was releasing its iPod Nano (and being weakly answered by Sony's revamped Walkman.

There were plenty of other emerging technologies to wonder about, too. People didn't seem all too interested in interactive television, and business travellers apparently had no desire to make use of wi-fi hotspots (one of those things would rapidly change). New technologies meant to stop identity theft seemed like they might actually be making it easier. Companies were slowly coming to grips with the fact that personal work surfing can't be stopped (and isn't bad anyway). And in news that shocked absolutely nobody, it turned out young men like shiny new gadgets more than older women.

Fifteen Years Ago

Speaking of interactive television, Microsoft tried it back in this week of the year 2000 as well (and nobody thought it'd work then either). And speaking of gadgets, how about a Casio wrist camera? (Apparently it was pretty cool.) Robotic pets and conversational online bots were on the way, as were human-implantable tracking chips... Some people were debating who should receive the dubious title of Most Downloaded Woman.

Microsoft seemed like it might be (slowly) starting to change, and so for that matter did Bill Gates. In the younger dot-com world, we unsurprisingly discovered that the majority of internet advertising is bought by dot-coms, while some preferred to just bankrupt themselves with Superbowl ads (perhaps because being young and rich doesn't always make you happy).

Sixty-Eight Years Ago

The word "bug" as a term for an engineering problem predates computers, but there's a folk etymology for use of the term in the computing world that is based on a true story (though the details are often presented wrongly). On September 9, 1947, an error in the Harvard Mark II (an electromechanical computer) was traced to a literal bug: a moth that had gotten trapped inside a relay. The moth was attached to the log book with the note "first actual case of bug being found", and now resides in the Smithsonian.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: August 30th - September 5th

from the and-prehistory dept

Five Years Ago

The last few weeks have been very focused on copyright news, but this week in 2010 there was more happening on the patent front. Microsoft showed some hypocrisy in seeking help against a patent holder, despite its strong pro-patent stance, while people were pointing out that the company's patent on fast shutdowns actually illustrates why Windows shuts down so slowly. Some were wondering if Paul Allen's patent trolling was actually meant to demonstrate how bad the patent system is, while all of us were wondering just why Steve Wozniak came out in favour of patent trolls, and tried to figure out whether patent marking lawsuits were patent trolling or anti-trolling. We also took a look at how the patent office outsourced its job to non-experts and how companies were not too keen on accelerated review of green patents, while the Public Patent Foundation was challenging the validity of eight HIV/AIDS treatment patents.

Ten Years Ago

Five years earlier, Microsoft was seeking a patent on a pay-to-spam scheme that would net them money from both the senders and recipients of spam. A judge upheld a huge patent fee for prepaid mobile services, while a would-be iPod competitor was using bluffed patent threats as a form of publicity. Oh, and it turned out that ringtones were patented, apparently. We saw some nutty stuff outside the patent realm too: Indian movie producers got an open warrant to search all of New Delhi for unauthorized movie copies, and architects were stepping up as the latest group to whine about copyright infringement. At least sanity reared its head in a few cases, such as a judge catching on to the RIAA's bullying tactics, and Disney actually considering un-windowed movie releases.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, still in the midst of turmoil, Silicon Valley at least got a dark chuckle out of a list of 25 signs your dot com is going out of business. There were plenty of more serious examples to look at, too: the horror story of VitaminShoppe.com, the shaky business models of popular content producers, and the typical house-of-cards collapse of CollegeClub.com. Even Saudi Princes were losing money in the Valley.

Silly patents were already off to a good start all this time ago, with the latest being a patent on making international transactions via computers. Many people were looking to the future, trying to predict what the internet would look like in 2004 and beyond, and prepare for the rise of robots. This was a time when Deep Blue was more famous than many celebrities but CD sales were still going up. And new trends were appearing, or at least being noticed: things like the internet's impact on religion, and the big business of translation. Change was rapid, so perhaps it's unsurprising that your opinion of Napster was primarily dependent on your age.

Half A Billion Years Ago

Okay, obviously I don't have anything dated to this week in the Cambrian era. But it was over a century ago on August 30th, 1909 that Charles Walcott began studying the 508-million-year-old Burgess Shale, a fossil field in the Canadian Rockies which has been critical to our understanding of the evolution of life on earth. It's still teaching us things today — just two years ago, a newly-discovered outcrop of the shale yielded 50 new species of animals in just two weeks of study.

Filed Under: history, look back