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

from the 88-years-of-communication-regulation dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we continued following the story of the school caught spying on students through webcams in their laptops, and the details were not looking good. Especially when we discovered the student in question was only guilty of eating candy.

This was also the time of ACTA negotiations, and when the internet chapter leaked, we got a look at how sneaky the negotiators were being. We learned which countries were fighting hardest against ACTA transparency, and European officials were getting concerned about the agreement. Meanwhile, the UK was supposedly backing down on the three strikes provisions of its Digital Economy Bill, but it turned out this was really just an exercise in rebranding and the bill still allowed for disconnection (that would last as long Peter Mandelson felt it should.)

You know that famous "I'm on a horse" ad for Old Spice, which the company continues riffing on to this day? Well, this was the year it originally aired during the Olympics (which, sidenote, was busy trying to get paid for tweets) leading us to hold it up as an example of how advertising is content. In a weirder attempt to enact that principle, EMI got State Farm to sponsor the embedding of OK GO videos (which were otherwise blocked), while the band's singer stepped up to point out that a lack of embedding hurts everyone.

Other upsets to the internet this week in 2010 included: the (secret) settling of the lawsuit between Perfect 10 and Amazon, the conviction of four Google executives on criminal charges over a YouTube video, the overblown freak-out over PleaseRobMe, the consideration of internet addiction for inclusion in the DSM and, perhaps most significant of all, the temporary takedown of the original Rickroll video.

Ten Years Ago

Looking back to 2005, you can clearly see the debates and practices that would lead to today's net neutrality battle. The vicious attacks on muni broadband by lobbyists were blatantly self-serving, and some companies went even further to outright prevent it. One group, fresh off of taking a Techdirt quote completely out of context to trash muni WiFi, went on to attack the idea of broadband-over-power-lines as well.

Lexmark got smacked down in its attempt to abuse the DMCA to block third-party ink cartridges, while HP was accused of building an expiry date into its cartridges. Apple, having recently launched its retail stores, was sued by Apple resellers and accused of unfair practices. And Google was accused of threatening French culture with its book scanning project by focusing on English books.

People were really beginning to realize how attached they were to their phones — and that losing them could mean losing friends. The rise of SMS was even threatening the greeting card industry. But, despite assumptions, constant texting seemed to be improving kids' language skills.

Fifteen Years Ago

If you do any work with web analytics today, you know that conversion rates are a key metric — but back in 2000 they were the new kid on the block. Then again, so were colour screens on PDAs and plenty of other high tech toys for grownups (though apparently not as many for kids).

British Airways announced that it would charge more for paper tickets, and we wondered if it would back down the way Delta did on a similar initiative. Palo Alto was experimenting with fiber to the home. Various magazines were looking at the state of things like digital currencies and weblogs like Techdirt (yes, still "weblogs"). And Techdirt itself briefly disappeared thanks to a DNS issue.

Eighty-Eight Years Ago

On February 23rd, 1927, Calvin Coolidge signed the new Radio Act into law, establishing the Federal Radio Commission that would, less than a decade later, become the FCC we all know so well.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the reporting-on-reporting dept

Five Years Ago

In the past five years, we've been convinced that Title II is a necessary step in the right direction for net neutrality — but back in 2010, we still holding out hope that the problem could be solved purely with competition. Nonetheless, we could already see the utter ridiculousness of most anti-regulation arguments and the bad behaviour of ISPs, from warning about the death of iPhones to blocking broadband stimulus efforts or favoring marketing lawsuits over service improvement. And we weren't convinced when the FCC chair said that Google Fiber represents enough viable competition.

These were also the early days of the New York Times paywall, when folks were still debating its fundamental structure and studying the question of how willing people are to pay for content online. Meanwhile the Times itself, like many other publishers, was attempting to sell people an expensive iPad edition (despite the obvious fact that pretty much all the same things can be done on the web). To some, the future of journalism was more about curation, or maybe even pay-what-you-want.

The USTR's infamous Special 301 report came out this week in 2010, and for the first time included an open comment system which we promptly utilized. It was nice and all, but it's really time to scrap the program altogether. And if you want to talk about copyright, maybe look at Public Knowledge's sensible ideas for reform.

Ten Years Ago

The future of digital journalism was even less clear this week in 2005. Some newspapers thought the best approach was to keep lots of content offline. The New York Times, for its part, bought About.com (since sold to Barry Diller's IAC). Of course, iPad editions weren't exactly an issue yet — at this time, analysts were still arguing about the distinction between PDAs and smartphones. That didn't stop lots of companies from pushing mobile TV, though, and while we still weren't sure how big of a draw it that would really be, we were happy to see Showtime start experimenting with straightforward online streaming.

This was the year that SHA-1 encryption was broken. Unfortunately, a decade later it's still in widespread use — though most companies are on track to deprecate it by 2017.

Also in 2005: some states were rejecting red light cameras while others were demonstrating their problems, an Italian DJ was fined over a million euros for his MP3 collection, a tattoo artist sued the NBA for showing his artwork, manufacturers were starting to make ultra-cheap phones for developing nations while companies at home were jumping on the gadget giveaway bandwagon, and we were catching on to the practice of UK libel tourism.

Fifteen Years Ago

Ah, 2000 — the not-exactly-dawn of the new millennium, and a time of much philosophizing and prophesying about technology. The New York Times (popular this week) realized we were stuck with the internet for better or worse; Forbes opined on the parallels between the internet and railroads; Salon debunked the idea that the internet makes us lonely; and everyone was trying to have their say about the wireless future. Some people were tackling more immediate, practical questions: does internet sex count as prostitution? Should married couples share an email address? Are online customers less loyal? And, critically, should Jeeves answer questions about sex?

Oh, and there was one very notable release this week in 2000: the original version of The Sims.

Sixty-Nine & Thirty-Seven Years Ago

We've got two milestones in the history of the internet and computing this week. First, on February 15th, 1946, the ENIAC was formally dedicated. It was the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, containing 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints according to Wikipedia.

Next, just a few decades later, after a snowstorm gave them few options other than cabin fever or feverish engineering, two Chicago men launched CBBS, the world's first bulletin board system on February 16th, 1978.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the the-roots-run-deep dept

Five Years Ago

This week, let's start by going global. In 2010, Italy blocked the Pirate Bay (again) while Norway refused to do so. The UK was still grappling with the Digital Economy Bill and its onerous provisions, Australia was trying to make Google censor YouTube videos and Iran was trying to pull the plug on Gmail and offer a state-run email service in its place. Meanwhile in Bollywood, one studio was experimenting with simultaneous theater and YouTube releases. A major Icelandic newspaper banned aggregators, while at the same time the country was announcing plans to become a haven of free speech and journalism. And many countries came together for two things: the Winter Olympics (once again utterly mishandled by NBC) and the ACTA treaty (oh sorry, I mean "executive agreement").

Today, many US cities are competing for a shot at Google Fiber, but it was this week in 2010 that the project was first announced — though we knew it couldn't spur real broadband competition all by itself.

In the world of media, you can guess what was happening, because it's always the same: various companies were struggling to figure things out with varying levels of success and denial. Warner Music was dancing around the obvious fact that hiking the price of music downloads slowed sales growth, and at the same time announcing the end of all free streaming licenses. Meanwhile, the Author's Guild was still fighting over Google Books, and trying to separate itself from groups like the RIAA — while a former music exec was telling them they were more alike than they realize. One author was complaining that ten bucks is an absurdly low price for ebooks, while at the same time new research showed that unauthorized ebook copies boost sales.

Ten Years Ago

Today, the anti-net-neutrality argument that people don't need or want faster broadband and wireless speeds is ludicrous, self-serving and shortsighted — but, admittedly, in 2005 things weren't quite so clear. There was some evidence that people couldn't find enough to do with broadband and were even giving it up for dialup, and the hype over forthcoming 3G was stymied by the fact that a lot of people weren't sure why they needed it. Of course, there was also already something fishy about the cable companies trying to downplay the importance of speed and the think-tanks railing against muni broadband. And today we know how things really played out: having all that broadband penetration led to the development of new, robust applications and services that nobody could have easily envisioned beforehand.

Of course, this was 2005, so plenty of people were still clueless about technology, including lots of politicians — the British parliament even banned Blackberries. People were still trying to foist self-destructing DVDs on the public, and cable television was feebly trying to mimic the internet. But we also saw the emergence of trends that are clear and dominant today: the use of email as a persistent storage and filing tool, the abandonment of landline phones, and the fact that musicians don't make money from copyright (that last one, while clear and dominant in reality, is not necessarily so in the minds of industry folk).

Also this week in 2005: Google Maps was launched, and so was MP3tunes (guess which one is still around!), we saw some of the earliest examples of companies freaking out about negative reviews, and Salon founder Dave Talbot stepped down.

Fifteen Years Ago

In 2000, we see the even deeper roots of even bigger trends. The severity of cybercrime was becoming clear, and DoS attacks were getting lots of attention — but also already often being blown out of proportion with lots of conspiracy theories and rumors of inside jobs attached to various incidents. People were predicting the post-PC era and the death of the newspaper (which still haven't quite arrived) and the coming wireless web (which absolutely has). People liked to toss around bold proclamations about the internet being dead or not dead or whatever the case may be, it was no longer cool to include ".com" in the name of your company, and people were rightfully asking questions about the future of online privacy. We also started noticing the growth of a questionable (and now extremely common) trend in tech startup culture: companies built with the sole purpose of being acquired for a cash-out.

Seventy-Seven Years Ago

If you're a fan of Star Trek, or Dr. Who, or Battlestar Galactica, or anything else from the pantheon of television science fiction both old and new, then you should know that it all started this week in 1938 when the BBC aired the first known science fiction TV program. What's more, the program was itself an adaptation of a monumental piece of sci-fi history: R.U.R., the 1920 Czech play that introduced the word "robot" to the English language and the sci-fi genre.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the predictions-and-foreshadowings dept

Five Years Ago

Before the Hachette fight, Amazon got in a conflict with Macmillan over ebook prices this week in 2010. Authors were mad at Amazon, but some in the industry were beginning to realize that change can be turbulent, but still good. Heck, even Rupert Murdoch's daughter acknowledged that piracy can be good. This is in stark contrast to the music duo that claimed it would stop selling CDs until all piracy is stopped (though that might have been a joke). Billboard Magazine took a shot at Techdirt directly, decrying our ideas about CwF+RtB, leading us to explain how it still takes effort and commitment.

Definitely not a joke, however, was the Citizens United ruling, which had just come out, leading us to wonder if a corporation could run for public office. Later in the week, a PR company took that idea a step further.

In Australia, iiNet won its lawsuit against movie studios claiming it was responsible for user infringement, and the ruling offered a great explanation of why ISP's can't be copyright cops. The industry responded by immediately asking for a government bailout and, of course, this story and this fight were far from over. On the flipside, an Australian court this week also decided that Men At Work's Down Under did indeed infringe on a decades-old folk song.

Ten Years Ago

Long before Bing, Microsoft made its first attempt at breaching the world of search this week in 2005 with MSN Search. Unlike some other things launched the same week — like Amazon Prime and OnStar as a standard GM feature — it didn't stick around.

The term "PDA" was in its dying days, with only a handful of people still distinguishing them from smartphones (which some were worried would wear down our thumbs). Video games were exploding beyond the central industry, with fan-made games and mashups getting attention (including attention of the legal variety). Despite regulation, spam didn't seem to be going anywhere soon, perhaps because it was still effective on a shockingly high number of people. And the latest trendy foray into culinary madness was high-tech food.

Also in 2005 this week: the RIAA sued a dead woman with no computer for sharing 700 songs, Google lost a trademark lawsuit over AdWords in France, an accidental button-push almost evacuated Connecticut, and some students cast the future of RFID into question by cracking a bunch of secure chips.

Fifteen Years Ago

There were lots of predictions flying around this week in 2000. The wireless, mobile future was becoming more apparent, and the potential for commerce therein becoming more exciting. That much came true, but so many of the details are off — like how credit cards stick around despite fifteen years of calls for alternatives. Kinda like Usenet, which is anything but mainstream, but also far from dead despite repeated predictions of its doom. And while gaming consoles have indeed evolved into more robust multimedia devices, they haven't replaced PCs the way some expected.

Also this week in 2000: BMG Germany's attempt at CD DRM was a disaster, email marketing was going legitimate, Motorola turned its sights on next-generation devices, and Techdirt saw an unexpected and unexplained traffic bump.

Three-Hundred And Seventy-Eight Years Ago

If you've studied economics, even casually or in passing, you've probably heard of tulip mania — a period of Dutch history in which tulip prices exploded then collapsed. It's generally presented as the first recorded economic bubble in history, and its lessons are still relevant to economics nearly 400 years later. This week marks the critical days in 1637 when the bubble began to pop — on February 3rd, tulip prices hit their peak, and by the 5th they were on the downturn. Spotty record keeping left a gap in the numbers after the 9th, but by May 1st the market had bottomed out.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the telecentennial dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, Mike was at the Midem conference in France discussing the future of music business models and good "reasons to buy" to be leveraged by creators. Not everyone got the message: EMI was still freaking out over a Harvey Danger lipdub video, and Blur's manager thought he could stop piracy. One Harvard professor claimed that the success of iTunes made it harder to discover new music, without much to back up this claim.

There was more stupidity beyond the world of music, too: Ubisoft unveiled its new online-only DRM, the Daily Mirror blocked NewsNow's aggregator, and Google found itself unable to depict the Australian aboriginal flag due to copyright. Bev Stayart sued Yahoo (again), Summit Entertainment shut down a Twilight fanzine, and Vision Media TV tried to skirt Section 230 by burying 800Notes in legal fees. Oh, and in one of my own very first contributions to Techdirt, we looked at the ridiculousness of the Vancouver Olympics' brand protection guidelines.

We caught up with Newsday's paywall experiment to find out that, after three months, it only had 35 paying customers. They tried to claim they didn't want people to pay or something like that (it wasn't very convincing). Meanwhile, a Guardian editor explained why paywalls harm journalism.

Finally, this week in 2010 saw the announcement of the Apple iPad, setting off a flurry of speculation about how it would change the publishing industry and our relationship with computers.

Ten Years Ago

Looking back to 2005, you can see the ongoing metamorphosis of the "cellphone" into the "smartphone". Devices were on the rise, with Ford replacing office phones with mobile phones. We also saw an early example of cops targeting people with such recording devices (okay... we were still calling them "cameraphones"). And the return of "texter's thumb".

Naturally this meant some were freaking out about the kids, saying they shouldn't use mobile phones. Some took it a step further, saying that blogs should be banned because they are supposedly a hotbed of pedophiles. Meanwhile, one savvy but dastardly kid was raking in the cash with eBay scams. Another kid found a bunch of errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, one more step in making people accept the power and brilliance of Wikipedia.

Oh, and that baby named Yahoo from last week? Turns out that was a fake.

Fifteen Years Ago

Web portals were a big topic in 2000. This week, we discussed the idea of commoditizing portals while Octopus.com experimented with more user customizability. We wondered if these approaches might sacrifice the power of brand, though some were suggesting that Yahoo's brand is its Achilles' heel.

Online advertising pioneer DoubleClick started working on more specific tracking, e-retailers came up with the idea of having sales rep chats pop up while browsing their online stores, and instant messaging was nominated as the next "killer app". Americans officially started liking email more than phone calls, and those who were disappointed about the Y2K bust could get therapy. But if this thirty-year prediction was correct, then we are now only fifteen years away from being able to scan our brains into computers.

Also this week in 2000, hot on the heels of the AOL merger, Time Warner announced its plans to merge music groups with EMI. They would go on to grapple with this plan for several months before giving up in October.

One-Hundred Years Ago

On January 25th, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson spoke to each other in the first transcontinental telephone call, from New York to San Francisco. It was nearly forty years after the same two men held the first wire conversation ever across a two-mile stretch between Cambridge and Boston.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the control-is-self-defeating dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010 was the beginning of the NY times paywall, sparking off huge amounts of discussion online. We weren't convinced. Ultimately, the paywall didn't seem to hurt the newspaper, but it didn't seem to bring much benefit either (or at least not enough for many other publications to follow in its footsteps).

There was a lot of stuff happening overseas five years ago. The UK was hiding ACTA details from MPs, carving out tiny ISP safe harbors for hate speech and, in a high-profile incident, arresting a man for tweeting a joke about blowing up an airport. A Swedish ISP was refusing to give up info under a new law, a proposal in Italy would see all video uploads requiring government approval, and German publishers were (as always) going after Google.

In the US, the FBI was caught breaking the law to gather phone call info from telcos, and Obama quietly made it legal. The president also criticized the patent office for its ridiculous workflow. CBS was letting classic Jack Benny footage literally disintegrate instead of letting fans digitize it, the Songwriter's Guild was trashing net neutrality, and then-boss of the MPAA Dan Glickman announced he would be stepping down. Also, the court in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case realized how crazy a $1.92-million award was and cut it to $2,250 per song (down from $80,000).

Ten Years Ago

In 2005, plenty of people were freaking out about Wi-Fi security risks. This week, we pointed out that they were probably exaggerating — though we did find at least one reasonable analysis.

Remember the short-lived term "picture phone"? Well, it was pretty common at one point — enough so that the owner of picturephone.com thought that he could sell it for a million bucks. A Maryland lawmaker re-floated the idea for a porn TLD (which now exists, and nobody cares about it). Dell CEO Kevin Rollins made the confusing claim that the iPod is a one-hit-wonder just like Sony's Walkman. We were noting that the biggest issue with the iPod was actually the iTunes store and the fact that you didn't really "own" your music.

We also had a discussion about the biggest obstacle to device convergence: demands for control in the form of DRM, exclusive formats and other pointless fragmentation of content and devices. Even the Sony chief admitted that DRM can hold up innovation. We knew it would be a big problem as broadcasters created digital stores. Meanwhile, Congress was getting ready to consider more intellectual property law, and then-FCC Chair Michael Powell announced his resignation.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, Transmeta started making processors. Turns out that was the beginning of a sad story of innovation: by 2007, the company had shifted away from semiconductor production and entirely to IP licensing, then in 2009 its patent portfolio was acquired by, wait for it... Intellectual Ventures.

Long before the New York Times paywall, the LA Times tried charging 20 cents to email a story (amazingly not still a standard business model). People were experimenting with multimedia, so you got things like the virtual newscaster and the print magazines from dot-coms. Techdirt itself got mentioned in print in Inter@ctive Week. Amidst all this, the challenges of online advertising were already becoming clear.

A former Microsoft exec bought a Bowling Association, but if you think that's odd, consider this: in 2000, Microsoft forgot to pay for several domain renewals and let sites like Hotmail lapse. A random guy used his credit card to pay the bill and renew them, and Microsoft gratefully sent him a $500 check for his trouble. This week, the guy decided to auction off the check.

Twenty-Nine Years Ago

On January 19th, 1986, the Brain computer virus was released into the wild. It was the first virus targeting IBM PCs running MS-DOS.

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the legacy-of-a-merger dept

Five Years Ago

There was a whole lot happening in the piracy wars this week in 2010. Grooveshark was sued again (in what you could easily call "negotiation via lawsuit" by rightsholders), record labels were demanding cash from the Pirate Bay's founders, and the EFF discovered a copyright loophole for the RIAA/MPAA in the FCC's proposed net neutrality rules. The copyright reclamation fight over Marvel characters was getting nasty and Jaron Lanier stepped onto the scene as a get-off-my-lawn type. These things weren't contained to the US, either: in the UK, ministers were pushing the Digital Economy Bill while Scottish schools considered anti-piracy education based on anti-drug campaigns; Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN shut down hundreds of (mostly unused) torrent sites; France's copyright three-strikes enforcement agency was caught using an unlicensed font; and European consumer electronics groups were fighting against proposed copyright levies. Amidst all this, Public Knowledge held World Fair Use Day.

On the patent front, Kodak launched a massive attack on Apple and RIM. Patent lawyer Gene Quinn was claiming that anyone against software patents is anti-innovation, while Union Square Ventures came out in favor of an independent invention defense.

Ten Years Ago

Today, the stats and rankings make it pretty clear that US broadband availability sucks. People were already noticing this all the way back in 2005, but it still wasn't entirely clear that it was such a huge problem at the time. At least it wasn't $400 a month for 10Mbps like one offering in Australia.

Ten years ago, texting was still only just catching on in the US — leading to some people, especially parents of cellphone-bearing kids, being surprised by their bills. Of course, as always, some people were making the evidence-free claim that kids shouldn't use mobile phones, while others were trying to stop cyberbullying with the help of Spider Man.

Also in 2005: A major exploit was found in Windows' DRM, and Microsoft tried to escape responsibility; Apple released the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle; IBM freed up 500 patents; Blockbuster made a smart (and self-serving) call for the end of release windows; pop-up ads starting giving way to overlays; and the inventor of the blue LED got a huge payout.

Fifteen Years Ago

Early in the morning on Monday this week in 2000, we heard the murmurs that AOL and Time Warner would be merging. A few hours later, it was confirmed, the media landscape was drastically changed, and the reactions began pouring in.

That was just one of two big events this week fifteen years ago. It's also the week that Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft's CEO and Steve Ballmer took his place. Meanwhile, in a less high-profile stepping-down, the Pentagon's Y2K expert left the agency.

Oh, and David Bowie opened an online bank. It's not still around.

One Hundred And Five Years Ago

On January 13th, 1910, the first public radio broadcast was transmitted from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. It was basically a failure, with the poor microphones of the day failing to adequately capture the live singers.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: January 4 - 10th

from the history-repeating-itself dept

Five Years Ago:

Bono thought that Chinese internet censorship was a good example of how the US should deal with music piracy. Viacom was in the thick of its lawsuit with YouTube, asking the court of summary judgment, but redacting nearly the entire argument because apparently the reasons were secret. Sony Pictures was refusing to send out some screener DVDs to promote its own films for the Oscars, because it was worried about piracy. A Finnish indie label claimed that it wouldn't sign any new bands unless the government magically stopped piracy. After that got some attention the company deleted that statement, and appears to still be releasing music. An analysis of the impact of the leak of the Wolverine film suggested that the leak may have actually helped at the box office. We were, once again, pointing out how there's basically no punishment for filing bogus DMCA claims -- and this was in the days before millions were sent every few days.

France was looking to put in place a right to forget law, while also floating an idea to just tax internet companies to fund record labels. France really, really hates the internet, huh? Meanwhile there was a good proposal in the UK to require copyright holders to have to demonstrate actual damages from infringement (unfortunately, that didn't go anywhere). UFC announced that it was going to sue individual downloaders even though the company knew that the cost of suing was more than any "loss." Speaking of copyright infringement, we wondered how some people could argue that inline linking was infringement, seeing as it's little different than deeplinking, which is legal. Of course, this fight lives on today over embedding. Meanwhile, in Singapore, remote DVRs were declared infringing, the opposite of the Cablevision case in the US.

Some guy sued his neighbors for refusing to turn off their WiFi. The FCC's very first attempt at net neutrality rules weren't faring well in court (just like the second ones, though hopefully they get it right the third time). We were rightly predicting that there was a coming fight between cable TV and the internet. Chris Dixon wrote a great piece talking about how the next big thing will start out looking like a toy -- something that I often still reference today. We discussed how, for all the promise of the Obama administration being the first "internet" Presidential administration, the reality was that once elected, the administration basically gave up on the public that helped it get elected. Cisco was realizing that patenting everything was a waste of time.

We were pointing out how more surveillance makes us less safe (yes, years before Snowden). We were concerned about the TSA sending subpoenas to some bloggers who wrote about some TSA directives.

Ten Years Ago:

As you may have heard, ten years ago I uttered the phrase "the Streisand Effect" for the first time, and that may be the most popular thing I've ever done. Yet another court told the RIAA that it can't subpoena info on downloaders without first filing a lawsuit (something some copyright trolls still don't believe). In response, the BSA asked Congress to change the law to force ISPs to hand over info (thankfully, that didn't happen). Someone conducted a whole study to point out that the entertainment industry was worried about file sharing.

Bill Gates argued that people trying to reform copyright laws to make them less draconian were just Communists, because, apparently, he understands neither the economics of intellectual property, nor Communism. An appeals court panel ruled that ESPN could, in fact, call Evel Knievel a "pimp" (in response, Knievel called the judges "bimbos."). We were already pointing out problems with red light cameras. A law professor "with three doctorates" fell for a Nigerian scam.

Fifteen Years Ago:

This was the week that AOL announced it was buying Time Warner, and the entire internet landscape shifted. But not necessarily in a good way (though I still argue the idea was sound, the execution was dreadful). Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs also dropped the "interim" part of his "interim CEO" title that he'd taken upon his return to Apple. With the failure of any doom and gloom scenarios post Y2K, some were angry at those who predicted the end of the world. Meanwhile, the SF Chronicle was predicting what would happen if tech stocks crashed (which they did 3 months later).

There was some discussion about the idea of using GPS to automatically slow down cars that were speeding (bad idea). I was excited about MP3 watches at CES (I even had one for a few years, and it was great).

One Hundred And Twenty One Years Ago:

A 47-frame film of Fred Ott sneezing, created by WK Dickson (working for Thomas Edison), was filmed and given a copyright, making it "the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture" thus kicking off the movie industry's over-infatuation with copyright that lives on to this day.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: December 28th - January 3rd

from the new-year's-edition dept

Five Years Ago:

Movie studios started planning how to stop Netflix from showing their films (which is why Netflix still has a limited selection of streaming movies). This was also the week that Viacom realized that of all the videos it had sued YouTube over, it had actually uploaded over 100 of them itself -- meaning both that they were fully licensed and proving the point that if Viacom can't even tell which videos are licensed and which are not, it's ridiculous to think that YouTube should just magically know which ones are which. Record label Interscope was trying to get people to buy CDs by offering you a copy of Tweetdeck software "for free!" if you bought a CD. Except, of course, Tweetdeck has always been free. The MPAA ratings people gave "It's Complicated" an R rating for showing movie watchers that pot can make you giggle. Nina Paley made a key point in noting that the problem has never been middlemen, but monopolies.

One court totally overreacted and ordered an entire website taken down because of some defamatory comments on them, while another court correctly rejected a lawsuit against a consumer complaint site (ConsumerAffairs) properly noting that Section 230 protected the site from liability over actions of its users. Meanwhile, the Canadian government sought to take down a parody site by the Yes Men, and it resulted in the ISP actually taking down 4,500 sites. Censorship at its finest.

We wrote about how automakers were abusing copyright law to force you to pay more for repairs. FCC boss Julius Genachowski's Facebook account spammed all his friends with a "make money now!" offer. And a court tossed out a silly class action lawsuit against Apple from people who said the iPod resulted in hearing loss.

Finally, we're only looking back five years here, but five years ago we wrote about how the blog MusicAlly was looking back at the major labels' "online strategies" from 2001. They weren't pretty, though the strategies were fairly amusing -- mostly focusing on proprietary formats and DRM. As we noted at the time, all of the strategies were focused on trying to recreate the old retail world where scarcity ruled. That's a really dumb strategy in an age of digital abundance.

Ten Years Ago:

It was (not surprisingly) a bit of a slow week. Minnesota kept trying to tax VoIP companies despite FCC rules saying that VoIP shouldn't be taxed like regular phone lines. Verizon's anti-spam system went haywire and just started blocking all foreign emails (that's one strategy...). Some music labels were apparently experimenting with sneaking spyware into media files (a bit of foreshadowing for the Sony rootkit scandal, which went public the following year).

We were also talking about early ride sharing programs, whether or not the internet was good or bad for social relationships, and musicians who realized it was good to give fans what they want. Oh yeah, we also discussed how you couldn't name your kid with a .com in his name in China.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Our final post of 1999 pointed out that the Y2K bug scare didn't actually result in that much business. Some had been predicting that "fixing" the Y2K bug would be a boost to some tech companies' bottom lines. Wired Magazine, which had bizarrely sold off its entire digital arm, including the wired.com domain name was trying to buy it back -- a deal that wouldn't actually be completed until 2006. ABC was getting (rightfully so) nervous about dot com bubble startups buying Superbowl Ads, asking those companies to pay cash up front. And just to show you how different things were in 1999, people were excited about the fact that DVDs were catching on, after some had expressed skepticism that they'd find a real market. Things have changed....

Thirty One Years Ago

AT&T was broken up as a monopoly by the US government. And, today, it's almost all the way back to a monopoly. Watch that pendulum swing...

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: December 21 - 27

from the history-at-christmas dept

Five Years Ago

A federal Anti-SLAPP law was introduced in Congress, and went nowhere. It's something we desperately need, and it's ridiculous that Congress hasn't taken up the issue. Various online publications were still whining about Google sending them traffic. Meanwhile, as the recording industry was whining about piracy, we noted that it would likely be blaming something else within a decade (I think streaming sites are the current obsession). IsoHunt lost a key ruling in court, saying that the site "induced" infringement by showing what was popular -- and also because the court took some statements by the site's founder out of context.

China took unending Hollywood-funded pressure to ramp up its efforts to stop copyright infringement... and used it as an excuse to censor more of the stuff on the internet that the Chinese government didn't like. Meanwhile, a German court decided that TV schedule information was covered by copyright. Demi Moore's lawyers thought that it was defamation to suggest that her images had been photoshopped. And the NBA was fining players for happily tweeting about victories too soon after the game was done.

There are two other interesting stories, just because nearly identical issues have cropped up this week, five years later. First, we had a discussion on whether or not sites should be forced to take down content if a court rules against the user -- if the user can't be found or is unable to do anything about the content. The sites are protected by Section 230 and don't need to do anything -- but some are suggesting otherwise. In fact, a judge in NY was suggesting that a Right To Be Forgotten might be a good remedy in this situation. The second was a story out of Chicago, done by the Chicago Tribune, noting that red light cameras seemed to be leading to more accidents. We've been reporting on this exact thing for many, many years, but this past week the very same Chicago Tribune reported on the very same issue again after doing a more detailed look at the numbers. Turns out its story from five years ago still held true: red light cameras increase crashes.

Ten Years Ago:

Do you remember when Cablevision thought that it was going to get into the satellite TV game and compete with DirecTV and Dish? It was called Voom and it failed miserably. Blockbuster (remember that company?) was realizing that Netflix was real competition. During this holiday season -- but years before smartphones were really a thing -- we were discussing the issue of bringing your email on vacation.

Despite all the fears about kids learning "texting speak," studies were showing that kids can understand the context and know they have to write differently in formal settings rather than sending a text to a friend. And yet some people still don't believe this. Trust me: kids are smarter than you think. Finally, we were learning about more and more documentaries that could never be shown again, because original licenses for archival footage and/or music wouldn't allow them to ever be shown again.

Fifteen Years Ago:

While most people were correctly predicting that the shift from 1999 to 2000 would not result in the Y2K bug ending the world, MTV was still pulling a publicity stunt and sending six people into a bunker to repopulate the world after everything fell apart. I wonder if they're still down there. Speaking of bad predictions, some were saying that Amazon.com was finished. In 1999. Oops. But, more seriously, online shopping was having some trouble delivering Christmas gifts on time.

Fifteen years ago, there were some early attempts to monitor driving traffic by looking at mobile phone data. The idea seemed perplexing to us -- and we wondered about the privacy implications. Of course, fifteen years later, we're all tracked everywhere we go... but we have pretty decent information about the traffic when we're driving. Finally, in those early days on the web, you could still put up fake job listings and convince people they were interviewing for a job at CBS.

Thirty Two Years Ago

Time Magazine named "the personal computer" as its "Person of the Year" -- the first time it went to a non person.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back