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

from the digital-wrong-management dept

Five Years Ago

Seems like there was lots of news about DRM this week in 2009. Cory Doctorow discussed how difficult Apple made it to publish a DRM-free audiobook, Blu-ray introduced the idea of "managed copies", a Microsoft Office DRM bug locked some users out of their own documents, Sony stood up in favor of expensive, DRM-laden ebooks, and film DRM threatened to prevent Avatar from being shown in 3D in some theaters. The only voice of reason was David Pogue, who pointed out that DRM-free ebooks boosted his sales.

France was a land of contradiction this week. Avid copyright defender and three-strikes architect Nicolas Sarkozy was caught infringing on copyright for a third time. Meanwhile, he also announced plans to spend over a billion dollars digitizing books — while a French court was ruling that Google's book scanning project violates copyright. Well, that all makes perfect sense.

But intellectual property madness is, of course, global. This week in 2009 also saw North Face file suit against South Butt, ASCAP start demanding license fees from venues where people play Guitar Hero, Google face complaints from the estate of Philip K. Dick over its then-upcoming Nexus One phone, the Judiciary Committee summoned the CEO of Justin.tv to defend himself on the subject of live sports piracy, Vimeo was sued over lip dub videos, and the FBI arrested the guy who leaked Wolverine in one of the highest-profile such incidents.

Ten Years Ago

As regular Techdirt readers know, we don't care about the fact that there are some sites out there that scrape and copy tons of our content, and such sites have been around for a long time. In 2004, however, we were especially baffled to find one being used to promote house cleaning services. Today, such PageRank-scamming setups are commonplace and instantly dismissed as stupid, but ten years ago they seemed really weird.

In the world of spam-law, this week in 2004 saw two notable events: Maryland's anti-spam law was ruled unconstitutional, while the UK's version of CAN-SPAM was proving totally ineffective.

Also in 2004: doctors weren't so sanguine about buying kidneys online, ICANN was approving more pointless TLDs, the MPAA started going after torrent trackers, a Canadian court struck down a copyright tariff on iPods (while the world realized that MP3 players aren't just for kids), and Blockbuster continued its long, futile fight against Netflix by ditching late fees.

Oh, and long before all the DRM action of 2009, the same things were stirring: Sony unveiled an exciting new DRM for CDs.

Fifteen Years Ago

During these few years around the turn of the century, there was a seemingly endless flurry of versions of the Windows operating system. This week in 1999 marked a major transitional milestone: the completion of Windows 2000, which would be released a few months later, and was the last version of Windows before XP commenced a new era. Meanwhile, in an early earth-tremor foreshadowing modern cloud computing and things like ChromeOS, MyWebOS was working on the in-browser operating system.

Today, domain and trademark disputes online are almost guaranteed to get pretty nasty, and domain-squatting for the sake of extracting cash is fairly common practice — but in 1999 it was still somewhat unexplored territory. This week, an 11-year-old kid in Britain registered waterfordcrystal.com as a joke. The company's response? First it said it didn't care, then shortly afterwards decided to buy the domain for the price of one college education.

There was a bizarre piece of data this week in 1999, suggesting that print newspapers weren't losing readers to online. As we correctly mused, this just meant the real generational trend hadn't fully kicked in yet. Meanwhile, the most exciting nascent venue for communications was the wireless web, which was still struggling along with WAP and WML. People were building communities and HP was even working with Swatch to try to build a smartwatch way before its time.

Also, in a bit of sad news, December 13th, 1999 marked the death of Catch 22 author Joseph Heller.

Fifty-Six Years Ago

This week on the Techdirt Podcast, we had an episode about the possibility of satellite-based internet access. Well, long before the internet, on December 18th, 1958, the world's first communications satellite was launched in a direct response to the Soviet Sputnik satellites. On board the SCORE satellite was a tape-recorded Christmas message from President Eisenhower, which it broadcast to the world via short-wave radio.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 30th - December 6th

from the adventures-and-misadventures dept

Five Years Ago

There were plenty of (mis)adventures in the world of newspapers this week in 2009. Some were trying out paywalls, Rupert Murdoch was demanding the feds stay out of the news business (except when he wants their help), Dallas News made the questionable decision to make journalists report to ad sales managers, some students were blocked from publishing their school paper in Illinois, and a brand new daily newspaper in Detroit lasted only a week before shutting down.

This week we were also still tracking the UK's Digital Economy Bill pushed by Peter Mandelson, which was already facing opposition from some politicians and tech companies, and spurred one indie label boss to resign from BPI and IFPI committees. In a follow-up to Dear Lilly, friend-of-Techdirt Dan Bull released a new open letter, Dear Mandy:

Ten Years Ago

In a recent history column, we talked about the fact that Bill Gates was getting 4-million spam emails a day in 2004. Well, looking back on posts from this week ten years ago, it appears that wasn't quite true: Steve Ballmer admitted he was exaggerating, and the number is actually 4-million a year.

Also this week: we got yet more evidence that speed cameras don't work and saw some of the hilarious excuses people use to get out of the tickets; we continued following the murmurs about global satellite projects following Google's purchase of Keyhole (that would lead to Google Earth); we pointed out that telco talk about "voice, video and data" is stupid, since all three are just data; and we mused about the future of music distribution online, since the idea that subscription streaming services might replace digital downloads was gaining steam.

Finally, this week in 2004, Techdirt got a big mention in the Wall Street Journal (and the article is still there but, alas, behind a paywall).

Fifteen Years Ago

As the world drew closer to the year 2000, not-actually-millennium-fever pervaded the culture, leading Wired to go maybe a little too in-depth on the subject of 2000 not really being the start of a new millennium. Speaking of Wired, this week in 1999 also saw the launch of the Vapourware Awards, though sadly the link in that post is one of the few that seems to no longer be working on Wired.

In the news world, it was a simpler time: classified ads were still going strong, and some papers had the bright idea to charge a premium to include a URL in an ad. At least one person in the book publishing world had a better idea of what was happening: a major name at Random House was predicting the ascendence of electronic publishing. Everyone was wondering what the killer app for wireless internet would be, not to mention the associated codes of etiquette.

Forty-Five Years Ago

Well, this is a big one: on December 5th, 1969, just over a month after the very first ARPANET message was sent, the entire original four-node network was established. It consisted of routers at UCLA, UCSB, the University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute. Within a few months the ARPANET would connect to the East Coast, and by 1981 had over 200 host computers with a new one connecting every 20 days.

BONUS: Five-Thousand Three-Hundred And Fifty-Four Years Ago

Okay, it's not much of a Techdirt topic, but it's rare that you get to go back over five-thousand years and still pin something to an exact date, so let's enjoy it: though it's not universally accepted, there's a stone in Ireland that appears to depict the oldest human record of a solar eclipse, which took place on November 30th, 3340 BCE. The archaeological and astronomical evidence is an interesting read (if you're into that kind of thing).

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 23 - 29

from the looking-back dept

Five Years Ago:

ESPN suspended Bill Simmons (from Twitter) for calling someone deceitful. Huh. That sounds familiar. ACS:Law, which was the UK version of Prenda before Prenda existed was just ramping up. Spam King Alan Ralsky was sent to jail. Microsoft was trying to shut someone up after they revealed some "flaws" in Microsoft's plan to bribe users to use Bing instead of Google. Speaking of Bing, Rupert Murdoch was toying with the idea of taking News Corp. sites out of Google's search results if Microsoft paid him enough. And Hulu was furious that people were actually embedding its videos, despite the fact that Hulu provided tools to embed.

We looked at how Hollywood was really at fault for a significant part of movie piracy, by not giving users what they wanted. Similarly, we looked at how the recording industry spent so much on payola to get people to hear their music for free -- and yet were so angry about piracy, which got people to hear their music for free. Speaking of Hollywood, the heads of the big studios had pretty much all settled on a new talking point: that they were really concerned about the independent filmmaker, rather than big studios when ti came to piracy. Of course, more indie films were being made than ever before, and those indie filmmakers now have many more ways to get supported than ever before, so that rang pretty hollow. And, a record label exec was arrested for not using Twitter to ask Justin Bieber fans to disperse.

We were celebrating Wil Wheaton saying people should "get excited and make things" rather than griping about how business models and such were changing online. Meanwhile, we highlighted some research about how copying and imitation are actually quite good for society, even if people think they're bad.

Ten Years Ago:

We were talking about how there were over 400 companies selling "VoIP" offerings, and wondering how they could possibly survive (spoilers: they didn't). The first case we'd heard of where scammers were trying to sneak malware through banner ads on popular sites. Unfortunately, this remains an issue today. People were starting to realize that stores like Best Buy were really showrooms for Amazon. And a court told the MPAA that it couldn't lump a bunch of unrelated file sharing lawsuits into the same case.

Also, ten years ago, Perfect 10 sued Google for showing thumbnails of some of its porn images hosted on other sites. That case would result in one of Perfect 10's many courtroom losses, and also set a good precedent concerning fair use. Also, ten years ago Congress started pushing for a new job in the White House, the IP Enforcement Coordinator -- a role they finally pushed through as part of the ProIP Act in 2008 (with the job coming into existence in 2009).

Fifteen Years Ago:

Ah, such a quaint time. We were excited about the possibility of paying bills online (seriously). This was the era of the "free ISP," though the catch was that if you used them, you had to deal with ads from them. So we found it interesting that a new one was launching, and its main selling point was that it was a free ISP with no ads. Instead, they hoped you'd buy stuff from their e-commerce store. Media merger potential is always in the news, so fifteen years ago, Time Warner as looking to buy NBC. Oh, and remember when AOL was so powerful that it could be evil without consequence? In order to ramp up its business of spamming its own users, AOL claimed that all of the opt-outs from spam had "expired" and users had to re-opt-out to avoid being spammed by AOL partners in the future. How nice. No wonder people started leaving in droves soon after.

Forty two years ago:

Atari released Pong, the first "commercially successful video game" kicking off the start of the video game revolution. Two years ago, on the 40th anniversary, Buzzfeed published an astoundingly wonderful history of Atari and Pong. Go read it.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back, techdirt

This Week In Techdirt History: November 16th - 22nd

from the the-less-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

A few weeks ago, we noted the anniversary of Peter Mandelson's dinner with David Geffen and subsequent plans to crack down on filesharing in the UK. This week, people began hearing murmurs about the second part of his plan: an attempt to let the government route around procedure and change copyright law at will. A few days later, the now-infamous Digital Economy Bill was presented, and it was just as bad as we feared. Meanwhile, and with perhaps-not-so-coincidental timing, Lily Allen was continuing her crusade against free music. On a more positive note, the UK courts dismissed a weak libel tourism case. And, hey, none of it was as crazy as what was happening in Liberia, where a small group of lawyers claimed to hold copyright over all the laws of the country.

Lots of people were discussing the implications of technology, sharing and "free" this week in 2009. We questioned a BCG study about how many people would pay for online news, noting that there's a big gap between what people say they'll pay and what they actually will. We also explained the Innovator's Dilemma in a whiteboard video sponsored by UPS. But at the same time, a Chicago Tribune columnist was whining about the fact that the public can share its opinions, and an InfoWorld columnist was arguing that information should not be free (in his free column). On the other hand, one librarian expertly skewered the attitude of gatekeepers.

Also in 2009: Spain declared broadband a basic right; a bunch of pop stars got sued over a patent on the big video screens at their concerts; Shazam got hit with yet another patent lawsuit; hackintosh maker Psystar lost big to Apple; Google presented a new books settlement; and The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker and moved entirely to DHT.

Ten Years Ago

Sometimes writing these posts is a touch depressing, because they really highlight just how long it's been taking for some messages to sink in. Even though 2009 was full of freakouts about filesharing and "free", it can't be written off as an understandable reaction to something brand new when, the very same week in 2004, folks like Jeff Tweedy had already gotten the message:

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

That could be a direct response to Lily Allen saying she'd prefer somebody buy a counterfeit CD than download her music for free — but it came five years earlier.

Of course, in 2004 a lot of the focus was on other things, especially online spam and fraud. E-commerce fraud was growing and spam was infuriating but effective. The FCC was trying to crack down on "advance fee" scammers from Canada, one college blocked all Yahoo and Hotmail emails in a desperate bid to escape spam, and it was revealed that Bill Gates received nearly 4-million (mostly spam) emails a day.

Hollywood was having a technology panic (how uncharacteristic!) about DVRs, and attempting to make skipping commercials illegal. But John McCain got in the way, noting how utterly absurd that is. Steve Ballmer attempted to scare people away from Linux with patent FUD, only to have the author of the study he was basing that opinion on openly contradict him. Microsoft was trying to patent the IS NOT operator in Visual Basic and printer companies were attempting to market crazy-expensive ink like some kind of luxury purchase. Perhaps the most tech savvy people around in 2004 were store-level managers at Starbucks: they were smartly advising the company to make its in-store Wi-Fi free.

Fifteen Years Ago

You could almost say this week marks the true beginning of the culture war over filesharing that rages to this day, for in 1999, this is when the RIAA announced it would sue Napster. It would eventually win of course — and as a result, fuel the innovation that gave rise to P2P sharing and torrents. Mission accomplished!

Also in 1999: Amazon became profitable (sorta); one of the first laptops for less than a thousand bucks was announced; Warner Brothers was battling with RealNetworks; Microsoft gave up on trying to integrate with AOL messenger; and Bluetooth was just starting to go mainstream, but phones that play MP3s weren't quite there yet.

86, 67 & 40 Years Ago

There are three events from this week in Techdirt prehistory that I thought would be of interest, and I couldn't choose just one, so here they are in chronological order:

• November 18th, 1928 marked the release of Steamboat Willie and is considered by Disney to be the birthday of its most beloved copyright character.
• In AT&T's Bell Labs on November 17th, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain first observed the properties of transistors — the discovery that would lead to the computing revolution.
• Less than thirty years later this week in 1974, the DOJ filed its antitrust lawsuit against AT&T and began the eight-year process of breaking it up into the seven Baby Bells.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 9th - 15th

from the tracing-beginnings dept

Five Years Ago

Nowadays we've got the Techdirt Insider Shop, where you can buy our ever-popular DMCA t-shirt, but five years ago we were running our original tiered RtB program for a limited time only, and this week was your last chance to get the original DMCA shirt.

This week in 2009, Modern Warfare 2 was released and quickly became the biggest entertainment launch in history across all types of media. It didn't go wonderfully for everyone, though: before the launch, some fans were pissed off about artificially limited multiplayer capabilities, and folks who purchased the game on Steam found they had to wait two extra days to play thanks to DRM. Also, in a bizarre reversal of the norm, a game modder turned around and sent a DMCA takedown over a video by the developer, Infinity Ward.

Rupert Murdoch made waves by claiming that he would remove all News Corp. sites from Google. Mark Cuban suggested it was all about Facebook and Twitter. It also sounded like the one good part of the WSJ paywall was going to be eliminated. Of course, as we pointed out, Murdoch owned plenty of sites with aggregators.

On the bright side of things, a lot of people in 2009 seemed to be coming around to the realities — and opportunities — of the digital age. More independent filmmakers were embracing the piracy of their films, more game developers were recognizing that it's not a huge threat (with one even "pirating" its own game as promotion), and Blink 182's Tom DeLonge was calling for artists to adapt, give music away for free, and sell other things. Not everyone was on board, though: the director of Zombieland was lashing out at fans after seeing a 60 Minutes episode about the evils of piracy.

Ten Years Ago

Once upon a time in the tech startup world, it was all about the IPO. Now, building a company to sell is standard practice. And this week in 2004 we were in the middle of that shift, and just starting to realize it. Lots of things were different then: video ads were a new and uncertain proposition, "entertainment as advertising" was just catching on, and Firefox was just hitting version 1.0.

It's hard to imagine now, but this week in 2004 automated public bathroom fixtures were still new. The complaints some had at the time — that the machines are often slow and unresponsive, or oversensitive — are frankly not entirely obsolete.

Today, Monster Cable is well known as an aggressive trademark holder, but ten years ago we were just catching on to the company's pattern as it sued job site Monster.com and threatened many others. We did see one interesting trademark resolution this week, too: the band The Postal Service reached an agreement with the US Postal Service wherein they'd help promote the USPS with their music.

Finally, from the pile of the bizarre/amusing/ironic: Blockbuster managed to convince itself it needed to open more stores, AOL was kicking users off of broadband and back onto dialup (try to wrap your head around that), and someone took a shot at finally killing the fax machine (a job which is, amazingly, still open).

Fifteen Years Ago

Though Yelp wasn't around until 2004, consumer ratings sites existed back in 1999, and this week some were beginning to notice just how fishy a lot of the reviews seemed. RealNetworks was still around, and the cracks were showing in its obsession with control. Amazon was very much around, and still tearing through the growth that would turn it into the powerhouse it is today, this week expanding into software, video games, gifts and home improvement for the first time. Webvan hadn't spectacularly collapsed yet, but the FedEx CEO saw the writing on the wall. Yahoo Messenger was also around, and it just became available on PDAs in an early step towards ubiquitous mobile messaging (though we were lukewarm on it).

Speaking of Yahoo, the company was being sued for its universal shopping cart (and, after the one-click shopping incident, we were really beginning to see a problematic trend).

157 & 47 Years Ago

November 9th marks two landmarks in the history of media and journalism — the births of publications that still hold sway and produce quality content to this day. In 1857, The Atlantic was founded in Boston, and in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone was published in San Francisco.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: November 2nd - 8th

from the looking-back dept

Five Years Ago

We were looking at what it would take to really reform copyright law thanks to a great paper from Jessica Litman. Meanwhile, one of our readers argued that there was actually a moral argument in favor of file sharing (I found it interesting, but didn't fully agree). Speaking of sharing, the White House was trying to claim that you couldn't modify its official photos, but that's not what copyright law says, since federal government works are public domain. In more bizarre government copyrighting, we discovered that Canada and Europe actually claim a copyright on the design of their currency. A court found that answers to textbook questions were a derivative work of the original, and thus potentially infringing.

The MPAA got some propaganda on 60 Minutes while we were wondering if any of this anti-piracy activity would actually make people buy. The MPAA was also claiming that if piracy wasn't stopped, the internet would die. And, of course, the FCC was looking at letting the MPAA break your TV and DVR because piracy. I was personally annoyed at Hulu for telling me I couldn't watch if I used my VPN.

In other news, Glenn Beck was not allowed to seize the domain name GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com, despite his attempts. Venezuela was blaming video games for violence. A court said that using a domain registration privacy service was "material falsification and David Brooks claimed that mobile phones were destroying courtship (I wonder what he thinks of Tinder).

Comcast was sure that the solution to customer complaints was to change customers' behavior, rather than its own business model. Retailers wanted a law blaming eBay for shoplifters selling stolen goods. Germany was already looking for blame Google copyright laws to "save newspapers." Oh, and the Obama administration broke out its first attempt to use a "state secrets" claim to kill a lawsuit about warrantless wiretapping.

And finally, we posted some results on our first experiment with asking you, our community, to support us.

Ten Years Ago

Time shifting TV was just catching on while voicemail was dying. Also, AOL was losing customers by the millions, which was funny for those of us who remembered its frequent press releases about each new million signups. Qualcomm spent nearly a billion dollars on a special TV system for mobile phones that absolutely no one wanted. Meanwhile a price war was breaking out in the DVD-by-mail space (remember that?). Oh and the broadband guys were already doing everything possible to block muni broadband competition.

We were wondering if virus writers deserved jailtime while some spammers were getting many years in jail. Meanwhile the feds were trying to track down the fax.com spammers who had been fined many times and just ignored it over and over again.

Bad patents were a big thing, with some company claiming a patent on international e-commerce and another on product recommendations. It was also one of the first times we'd seen a lawsuit over a negative review (and companies still don't seem to realize you can't really sue over that). Oh, and of course, the MPAA was copying the RIAA's bad strategy of suing file sharers.

Fifteen Years Ago

A court ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly while Webvan -- one of the classic dot com bubble startups -- had its IPO right at the height of the bubble era, just as competitor, HomeGrocer raised $100 million. Another classic of the bubble era was the online pet store category. While Pets.com was the most famous there were half a dozen or so competitors. One of them, Petopia, raised $66 million before launching and claimed its "differentiating factor" was it had more money than everyone else. And then, fifteen years ago this week two other online pet stores raised much more money, each breaking $100 million for unproven businesses in a highly competitive market. Think about that when people claim we're in a bubble today. Over in Europe, some folks were trying to copy Silicon Valley's bubble with the infamous boo.com -- and it wasn't going well (for the investors, at least).

Back in 1999, Microsoft was already looking at ebooks while Barnes & Noble bought books.com, which had been an attempt to take on Amazon by Cendant (which, at one time, had been considered an up-and-coming internet company) as well as a big stake in a publishing on demand company.

Fifteen years ago was also the week when we got one of the first absolute nutty web-meme/internet celebrities with the rise of Mahir, the "I Kiss You!!!" guy. His original web page has been moved, but you can see it here, and for you young kids who missed the Mahir phenomenon, you may immediately notice the resemblance to the later Sascha Baron Cohen character Borat -- something that apparently angered Mahir.

Twenty Six Years Ago:

The infamous Morris worm was unleashed on the internet, by Robert Morris -- who was just trying to measure the internet. Instead, it ended up taking down much of the internet, and Morris has the unfortunate claim to fame of being the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This represented the first of many abuses of the CFAA law, which still is in desperate need of fixing, and which Congress still refuses to fix. On a somewhat related note, years later, Morris went on to cofound YCombinator. Also, in the very first YCombinator class, one of the entrepreneurs was Aaron Swartz, who (as you well know) went on to kill himself while facing criminal charges under the CFAA for downloading too many journal articles from a website he had legal access to. Today would have been Aaron Swartz's 28th birthday (yes, he was born two years to the day before the Morris worm), and there are a bunch of hackathons in his honor going on.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 26th - November 1st

from the five-ten-fifteen-twenty dept

Five Years Ago

A lot of these history posts have mentioned the lead-up to the GeoCities shutdown, and this week in 2009 it finally happened. Goodbye, GeoCities.

It's easy to forget now that Netflix started as a DVD-rental-by-mail service before it became a streaming juggernaut, and for a long time the streaming service was considered an add-on. So it's funny to hear Reed Hastings in 2009, claiming that Americans don't want a streaming-only service. How times change.

Also in 2009: UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson came home from his dinner with David Geffen and promptly introduced an anti-file-sharing plan; the RIAA spoke up about net neutrality, saying they support it as long as it gives them a way to block file sharing; Germany was investigating criminal infringement charges against Google; an Italian politician tried to file charges against nearly 5,000 YouTubers; Amazon was appealing the rejection of its one-click patent in Canada; and, in an appropriate counterpoint to all this negativity, the EFF launched its Takedown Hall of Shame.

Ten Years Ago

Remember pay phones? They were still a reasonably common fixture in 2004, but their days were clearly numbered. That didn't stop BT from trying to rescue them with a bizarre plan for pay phone music downloads. I guess that's one way to approach device convergence, with another being publishing a bunch of lifestyle magazines about it.

Ten years ago, reporters suddenly discovered that celebrities were online, and that a bunch of amateur reporters were too (and doing a pretty good job). Rolex discovered that it was a fixture of online spammers, then proceeded to get confused and send a C&D to a mailing list that had been receiving such spam. Blockbuster realized (to no ultimate avail) that it had to drastically change its business model, and ICANN failed to realize that nobody would care about .travel and .post domains.

Also, back in 2004, there was not yet such a thing as Google Earth. In fact, it was this week ten years ago that Google bought Keyhole and laid the groundwork for the insanely comprehensive maps/earth service we enjoy today.

Fifteen Years Ago

As we approached the year 2000, it became time for the lists of millennium predictions. I suspect many of the predictors are glad the link is now dead. Not that there was no catalyst for panic: the world was full of lab-grown arteries and genetic auctions promising a sci-fi future. Plus, we were gathering rumours about the mysterious X-Box, and who could resist getting excited about that?

1999 was long before anyone talked about the "cloud". In fact, the whole idea of online storage space was new and a little odd, met with doubt by many people including us here at Techdirt. We were also a little dubious about the idea of online retailers opening brick & mortar shops, and we were a little more on the money with that one.

Twenty Years Ago

Before Techdirt was around, HotWired launched in 1994. It was the first commercial online magazine, and notable for being an entirely distinct entity from the print magazine Wired, even though it was launched by the same company. Of course, HotWired also gave birth to the banner ad as we know it today, selling the first ever display campaign to AT&T. So, mixed blessings all around...

Filed Under: history, look back

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

from the sweet-reminiscence dept

Five Years Ago

It seems like there were a lot of shifting opinions this week in 2009. Media analysts began to realize that charging for online news was almost surely a losing proposition; Gartner was finally realizing that social networking at work isn't so bad; despite an anti-piracy "education" campaign, people in Sweden were becoming less and less concerned about file sharing — and, indeed, talk about the "death of file sharing" at the time was clearly exaggerated, while several musicians were beginning to realize that it's not as evil as they thought. And Europeans were being a bit confusing, supporting the idea of digitizing books as long as Google wasn't the one in charge.

Of course, we also saw plenty of the usual: Monster Energy Drink started bullying a beverage review website and a harmless actor. The Sex Pistols were also getting in on the trademark game. Hollywood was trying to contractually stop stars from connecting with fans, copyright holders were targeting university copy shops, PRS went after a shop assistant for singing at work, and the Wall Street Journal's managing editor called those of us who believe in free content neanderthals.

We were also in the middle of the Shepard Fairey/Associated Press dust-up, with Fairey foolishly destroying evidence and sacrificing good will — though we also wondered whether you could really trust the AP's coverage of the lawsuit.

Ten Years Ago

Remember that time in 2006 when the internet collapsed under its own weight and died an ignominious death? No? Well, in 2004, that's what one researcher was predicting. Not all the predictions ten years ago were bad though: people were cluing in to the future of device convergence and the need to ease up on brand management (I don't think Monster Energy got that message).

In the world of television, there were a few things going on. Work began on getting mobile HDTV ready to launch even though nobody seemed interested in mobile TV at standard definition; there was lots of chatter about devices that let you shut down any TV nearby by cycling through remote control codes; HBO was locking down the ability to copy programs, with flagrant disregard for fair use; and one man's TV caused a bizarre stir by broadcasting an international distress signal for some reason.

Today, it's almost impossible to imagine Christmas shopping without the internet — but in 2004, people were still wondering whether e-commerce could thrive without extreme holiday promotions. Publishers, meanwhile, were still worried about BugMeNot, and lots of people were worried about cyberbullying. One European Commission lawyer was not even a little bit worried about using his fax machine properly, and that cost 100 million euros when he put a document in upside-down and sent the court 100 blank pages.

Fifteen Years Ago

It's a shame that so many links from 1999 are now broken. Fifteen years ago, we pointed to an article by Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web — but sadly, the link now just puts you on the MSNBC home page. I haven't been able to track down the exact article, but I suspect it was related to his book Weaving The Web, released the same year.

Two years ago, Encyclopaedia Britannica stopped publishing in print — but back in 1999 it had just launched its website, only to see it knocked out by high traffic. Technical difficulties also plagued the online chess match between Kasparov and the world.

Amazon's one-click purchase patent is among the most infamous "bad web patents", and this week in 1999 the company sued Barnes & Noble over it. A less high-profile web battle also broke out, with funeral directors fighting against online casket sellers. And a bunch of software companies discovered that nobody cared about their No Piracy Day.

Today it's assumed that basically everyone has a working knowledge of the internet — but in 1999, companies were just realizing that "internet experience" is an important qualification for a CEO. A lot of companies were also planning millennium parties, since they wanted their employees around in case Y2K really turned out to be a disaster. And the state of Massachusetts was trying to brand itself the ".commonwealth" to compete with Silicon Valley.

1999 was a post-Playstation world, and a new big console war was brewing. At the time, the X-Box was a "mysterious" tease, the GameCube was still codenamed "Dolphin", the PS2 was gearing up for release in Japan, and the Sega Dreamcast was still considered a serious contender.

153 Years Ago

October 21st, 1861 was a landmark day in the history of telecommunication: the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed, connecting the small existing networks on the east and west coasts, and ushering out the Pony Express (which shut down two days later). The overland line would play a major role in America for the next eight years before being replaced by a new set of lines running along the Transcontinental Railroad route.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: October 12 - 18th

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

Five Years Ago:

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

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

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

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

Ten Years Ago:

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

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

Fifteen Years Ago:

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

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

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

Twenty Years Ago:

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

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

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

from the hindsight dept

Five Years Ago

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

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

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

Ten Years Ago

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

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

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

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

Fifteen Years Ago

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

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

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

One-Hundred And Forty-Six Years Ago

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

Filed Under: archives, history, look back