This Week In Techdirt History

from the who-was-suing-whom? dept

Another week? Another week to look back through Techdirt history.

Five Years Ago::

Oh the lawsuits we witnessed. A sculptor sued the Post Office for featuring his sculpture on a stamp -- even though that sculpture was a part of the Korean War Memorial in DC. The amazing thing was the sculptor eventually won the lawsuit. To this day I don't get it. I can't see how (a) no one bothered to get the rights from the guy in the first place and (b) how this wasn't fair use. Speaking of nutty legal situations, this was also the week that Kevin Cogill, the guy who uploaded (but did not initially leak) Guns 'N Roses long-awaited album was sentenced to 2 months house arrest and told to produce propaganda for the RIAA -- something he never actually had to do, leading to him telling the full story of his crazy situation earlier this year.

This week the National Portrait Gallery in the UK threatened someone at Wikipedia for downloading public domain images. A filmmaker sued some online forums because commenters cost him a job and Wells Fargo sued itself.

Meanwhile, Amazon had made the book 1984 disappear from people's Kindles, a Swedish ISP was refusing to give up IP addresses and (in a twist) Belgium was fining Yahoo for protecting the privacy of its US users.

Finally, we were writing about artists who were refusing copyright as against their religious beliefs, journalists demanding money from Google, songwriters insisting that they can't write songs without copyright and newspapers still believing that paywalls would solve all their troubles.

Ten Years Ago:

The RIAA was busy a decade ago. Not only were they pushing the "INDUCE" Act to try to make inducing copyright infringement a form of copyright infringement (Congress never passed it, but the Supreme Court effectively created an inducement standard soon after), but they were also busy pushing Audible Magic's filtering system as the precursor to ContentID. In fact, most non-YouTube sites still make use of Audible Magic. Meanwhile, Streamcast was accusing the record labels of collusion (some things never change).

Microsoft won $4 million from a spammer, Cameron Diaz was sending legal threats to Gawker and we were just figuring out how to use mobile phones on planes. Just in time, too, because 3G mobile services were just starting to show up.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Oh those dot com boom days. Microsoft became the first company to be worth over $500 billion. They're well below that today. Petopia -- one of a big list of "pet dot coms" raised $66 million despite not having launched yet. Network Solutions randomly transferred Excite.com's domain to some dude in Illinois. Other than pet dot coms, the most overhyped thing in that time was "free PC" companies who would offer you free (but really crappy and underpowered) computers if you let them put ads all over the screen. Except... all of those companies were failing to make any money.

Meanwhile, Virgin was trying to get ahead of the digital music world by allowing you to download music and burn it to a CD (what a concept!). In one of our earliest stories about patent lawsuits, Ask Jeeves was being sued for infringement and we noted with disgust that it was by a company that didn't appear to actually do anything, but just try to sue people. This was before the term "patent troll" was popular. Those were the early days of patent trolling though.

46 Years Ago:

We weren't around, but this week Intel was founded, after Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove split from Fairchild Semiconductor (which Noyce, Moore and six others had started as the "traitorous eight" after quitting Shockley Semiconductor as a group). Intel, of course, became a key player in the computer revolution, but the story of the company's founding is also an important Silicon Valley lesson in the nature of people who aren't happy with their current jobs jumping ship to start something new. So much of Silicon Valley history is based on stories like that.

Filed Under: archive, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the the-end-of-innocence dept

Time for another look back through Techdirt history...

Five Years Ago:

Probably the biggest news item to kick off this week in 2009 was the News Corp. phone hacking scandal: the Guardian published its expose, and while it was clearly a big deal, I don't think anyone knew just how huge it would become. With some less nefarious but highly sloppy journalism, a syndicated PC World article claimed that using the Pirate Bay costs $27.

In the legal world, a New Jersey judge said bloggers aren't journalists, a European judge said IP addresses aren't personally identifiable information, and Judge Alex Kozinski was cleared of charges trumped up against him.

Recently, Tesla Motors made waves by essentially opening up all its patents — but five years ago, Toyota was still slowing the growth of hybrid vehicles by maintaining a nasty patent thicket around core technology. This was a week that even the Pope questioned intellectual property.

Ten Years Ago:

This week in 2004, we got gifted with plenty of bogus piracy stats from both the BSA and the MPAA. The latter's paranoia was ever-mounting, and it had just announced plans to lock Academy screener DVDs to special DVD players.

Mobile phone paranoia was following a similar course, with studies claiming they lead to teenage sex and violence. Meanwhile, one company tried to stay ahead of the curve by patenting the Star Trek communicator.

Also in 2004, the idea of "web applications" was still fairly new, and some were pointing to still-young Gmail as proof that they can work.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Ten years before the aforementioned phone hacking scandal, Rupert Murdoch was explaining that he will never understand the internet, but he'll still invest in it. And before the tech-charged campaigns of today, US politicians were also testing the digital waters. The average person was just discovering that email can change the dynamics of romance, and psychiatrists were noticing that the internet had started playing a role in a lot of psychotic delusions. HDTV was new and still rather confusing, thanks to competing manufacturers, and DVRs were so new that we were still calling them PVRs.

386 & 225 Years Ago:

We've got a double this week, dealing with the long history of freedom, rights and ultimately the US constitution. Firstly, on June 7th, 1628, King Charles I of England assented to the Petition of Right — an early constitutional document that is just as historically important as the Magna Carta, and from which grew the principles that would lead to the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh amendments in America. Then, 161 years and one day later on June 8th, 1789, James Madison proposed the amendments that would go on to become the Bill of Rights.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the going-way-back dept

A little less to go through this week in history, as we mostly took July 4th off, but still plenty of news to look back on.

Five Years Ago::

An American court banned a book. I still shake my head over this. But, yes, an American court banned an unauthorized "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye, saying that it was copyright infringement... and leading us to wonder if this case put the nail in the coffin of the idea/expression dichotomy concept in copyright law.

Meanwhile, a judge was tossing out the dangerous CFAA ruling against Lori Drew (which found her guilty of a crime for "violating" MySpace's terms of service, but was really an attempt to punish her because a girl her daughter had bullied committed suicide), and Jammie Thomas began her appeals process of the RIAA's big win against her (that appeals process eventually failed). The other big story of the week was that the Pirate Bay was supposedly bought by a public company, but as more and more details came out, that story got more and more questionable, eventually leading nowhere.

There was plenty of news in the patent trolling world. Intuit paid a $120 million tax to Intellectual Ventures to avoid getting sued, there was a ridiculous interview with Erich Spangenberg, one of the biggest patent trolls out there. And, the guy after whom the term "patent troll" was originally coined, Ray Niro, found that his favorite patent -- which he claimed covered any JPEG image, and which he'd used to sue plenty of businesses who upset him in one way or another -- was smacked down.

On the copyright front, five years before the Aereo ruling came out, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in the Cablevision remote DVR case that may or may not have been overturned with the Aereo ruling. In those lovely days before copyright trolling came to US shores, we were already finding out how lucrative it was overseas. Oh, and the Australian media was bleating on about laughably inaccurate claims about how piracy funds terrorists.

It was also a big week for misplaced blame. Craigslist was sued because someone holding the trademark on "call first" thought he could get money out of the company because people used that phrase in posting. L'Oreal was trying to blame eBay for users posting counterfeit goods. Police were -- no joke -- blaming Google Earth for koi thieves. Obviously. And then media execs were blaming content creators who put their work online for free for "insulting" those who paid for cable. Because free is evil.

Ten Years Ago::

A judge slapped down an attempt by famed spammer Scott Richter to sue SpamCop for blocking some of his spam. And yet, a study was pointing out that a ton of people were still buying products from spam. I wonder how much that's changed. This past week, Google finally announced that it was shutting down Orkut, one of its first attempts at building a social network, but ten years ago, the company was getting sued for appropriating the code of another company (which Orkut Buyokkokten had founded) in order to build Orkut.

The Jack Valenti era of the MPAA ended and Dan Glickman took over, making the MPAA become incredibly dull. Hard to believe that was ten years ago. Former FCC boss Michael Powell told us that "broadband over powerlines" would be the solution to a lack of competition, but as we predicted broadband over powerlines was clearly a joke played on a gullible FCC. Remember micropayment company Peppercoin? No? No one did back then, either. Ten years ago, we were also marveling about the possibility of controlling computers with body gestures. And, in less than ten years, everyone's already bored with Kinect.

Fifteen Years Ago::

Right in the middle of the original dot com bubble, we had some crazy IPOs, such as a company trying to go public on revenue of $74,000. For all the worries that we're in another bubble these days, at least we're not seeing stories like that any more. Of course, we also saw that Ask Jeeves had a great IPO leading us to wonder when Google might IPO (yes, seriously, we were wondering that back in 1999). And, of course, the greatest symbol of the dot com bubble was the funding frenzy around pet food/supply dot coms. There were a whole bunch of them, and each raised more money than the next. I even remember one insisting that it's competitive advantage was that it had outraised its competitors, and a day or so later, one of its competitors raised many millions more. Crazy days.

It wasn't just IPOs, of course. There were plenty of buyouts going on as well. We covered some buyouts of music tech startups as well as Slashdot being acquired by Andover (remember when that happened?). Of course, buyouts often have a way of going sour, and people were already getting angry about Yahoo's stewardship of GeoCities, while Microsoft couldn't figure out how to keep Hotmail running.

Meanwhile, we were wondering if open source was finally going mainstream and we imagined a crazy dark future in which people could get instant messages on their mobile phones. The horror!

48 Years Ago:

We weren't publishing, but President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, and it has since been a useful, if frustratingly ignored by government, tool for journalists, both professional and amateur, ever since.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the back-again dept

Another week, another fifteen years to look back over.

Five Years Ago:

In the wake of the Jammie Thomas ruling, which we discussed in last week's look back, Moby said the RIAA should be disbanded and Richard Marx (whose music was included in the lawsuit) apologized to Thomas. Meanwhile, the RIAA insisted that the ruling showed that the public is against file sharing. I think it really showed just how delusional the RIAA can be at times. Meanwhile, newspapers were accusing Google of being a "digital vampire" while judge Richard Posner was bizarrely suggesting that copyright law get a special extension just to protect newspapers from the likes of Google.

Comcast and Time Warner were working hard to limit your ability to watch TV online while ASCAP was insisting that when your phone rang in public, it was a public performance for which it should get compensated (that argument didn't fly in court). A town in Connecticut, however, told ASCAP and BMI to take a hike when they tried to demand royalties from local establishments.

Amanda Palmer was in her early days of successfully experimenting with forms of crowdfunding, while Mythbusters Adam Savage was learning the horrors of insane international roaming fees for mobile phones. Tivo cynically bought a bull in Marshall, Texas in a weak (failed) attempt to influence a jury there in a patent trial. In a preview of today's cab driver fights against Uber, cab drivers were screaming mad about free competition in Tampa.

Oh, and someone realized that if copyright law had been around in the time of Shakespeare, we'd probably not have a bunch of his classic plays today.

Ten Years Ago:

The MPAA's Jack Valenti was trying to rewrite history to edit out his claim to Congress that the VCR would kill the movie industry. And, on cue, his buddy, Senator Orrin Hatch was pushing a pair of absolutely terrible copyright bills in Congress: the INDUCE Act to make inducement copyright infringement and the PIRATE Act to let the FBI work on civil copyright cases as the private police force of Hollywood. Thankfully both failed to become law, though the Supreme Court effectively made the INDUCE Act law with its Grokster decision not too long after that.

Ten years ago, SBC (which became AT&T) was promising to install fiber to the home. Amusingly, we just mentioned that again this week in highlighting how AT&T has a long history of lying about these things, as it did ten years ago. Thankfully, ten years ago we were pretty skeptical, noting that the company has a history of promising things and not delivering. Turns out we were right.

Tiffany sued eBay for not policing counterfeit goods, kicking off a years-long process that (eventually) ended in courts making it clear that eBay is not liable. Those rulings have been quite important, so I guess we should thank Tiffany for losing those cases.

Finally, ten years ago this week, SpaceShipOne became the first private space ship to break the space barrier, kicking off the private space race that is still underway today. This is one of those stories that still feels like it just happened recently to me... How time flies.

Fifteen Years Ago:

We were marveling over the idea of coupons sent to mobile phones and the brave new world of online banking. Some foolish people were still using analog mobile phones that were easily hacked, leading some enterprising hackers to rebroadcast calls they were intercepting via Shoutcast. If someone did that today, the DOJ would try to lock them up for decades. And, a study found that people were more truthful over email. I wonder if that would still be true today...

146 Years Ago:

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter, though he soon "disowned the machine and refused to use, or even to recommend it." The patent (US 79,265) was sold off for $12,000.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the playing-telephone dept

Let's get started on another look back through Techdirt history.

Five Years Ago...

Well, there's one big event from 2009 that you'll surely remember: a jury deciding to fine Jammie Thomas $1.92-million, or $80,000 per song. Even though Thomas made a big mistake by not settling, the insanely huge award raised a lot of eyebrows — including those of the EFF, which questioned the constitutionality of the decision — prompting the RIAA to go on the defensive and attempt distance itself from the giant numbers. Meanwhile, an even more absurd case nearly slipped under the radar when a woman who didn't even own a computer made a zero-dollar settlement over a filesharing lawsuit that never should have been brought in the first place.

That wasn't all the RIAA was up to. It was also demanding an investigation of radio stations "boycotting" musicians who supported the Performance Rights Act, despite having just recently described radio as "a kind of piracy". Meanwhile, they were insisting that terrestrial radio needs to match its royalty structure to that of satellite and internet radio — a royalty structure they had originally fought for on the basis that those services were entirely different from terrestrial radio.

Also this week in 2009: Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) "forgave" Coldplay for "copying" his song, Adrian Jacobs joined the line of people trying to accuse JK Rowling of copying them, and EA put its foot in its mouth (a longstanding tradition) by staging fake protests for a new game.

Ten Years Ago...

Remember the ill-fated idea for a "do not spam" list? This week in 2004 is when the feds officially ditched it. An infamous family of Canadian spammers also claimed to have changed its ways, while a professor from Singapore predicted that spam would be gone within two years (we were sagely unconvinced). We also noticed that in the business world, IT departments were doing a damn good job at keeping spam out of employee inboxes.

Spam wasn't the only area of nefarious activity ten years ago. Companies were teaming up to stop phishing scams and the first smartphone worm was discovered — though some didn't even need worms to panic about 3G phones.

As a reminder of just how long ago this was: we were excited about new wireless network storage and Amazon's amazing plan to let people watch preview snippets of DVDs online. And to remind you how little things change: indie labels were accusing Apple of bullying them into unfavorable terms, and quantum teleportation was one step closer but still oh so far away, much as it is today.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 1999 marked the death of DIVX. No, not the video codec — that was actually mockingly named after the original DIVX, an attempt by Circuit City to get people to buy DVD-like rental discs that expire and stop working. It also marked the birth of satellite radios built into cars and internet-specific insurance policies.

The world was still in the early days of the switch to digital projectors in movie theatres, and George Lucas used this as a chance to show off The Phantom Menace. Amazon.com invested in Sotheby's, and Sex.com was engaged in some bizarre shenanigans.

Oh, and some were saying that the much-hyped internet was underhyped. They weren't entirely wrong, though "hype" is a tough thing to measure — but the original article is still up if you want to see some of their predictions.

174 Years Ago...

On June 20th, 1840, Samuel Morse received his patent on the telegraph. Also on June 20th, but 37 years later in 1877, Alexander Graham Bell opened the world's first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, just an hour's drive from where I type this. Communication technology advanced a little slower in those days.

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the broadband,-tv-and-rats dept

Time for another walk down Techdirt memory lane. Let's get started:

Five Years Ago...

In 2009, the digital world was grappling with a lot of the same issues it is now. Piracy, always a hot topic, was being hashed out throughout Europe, with France gutting 'three strikes' and Germany declaring "accidental" file sharing to be legal. Meanwhile, the head of UK ISP TalkTalk was sending a clear message to the recording industry: you can't beat pirates. This was also the week of an infamous copyright claim you may remember: an Australian publishing firm claimed that Men At Work's "Down Under" was a ripoff of the 1930s children's song "Kookaburra". Sadly, less than a year later, a judge would find that the song did infringe and award the publisher a bunch of royalties. Another year after that, the high court would refuse to hear the band's appeal.

Online gambling was another big concern in 2009, and its status was still unclear. The same week that the feds started freezing the funds of online poker sites was the week that Minnesota backed down from its plans to block gambling sites.

Also this week: judges were still divided on the question of whether students could be punished for off-campus speech on social media, e-voting machine glitches were continuing to pile up, the Canadian patent office rejected software and business model patents, and we asked whether ICANN should dump the idea of generic TLDs. Finally, this week featured a post that I always keep bookmarked, since the quotes therein are fun and frequently apposite: a round-up of people damning new things, ranging from video games through telephones and all the way back to the waltz.

Ten Years Ago...

UK ISPs made an appearance this week in 2004, too — but this time it was because they were trying and/or being asked to help filter porn. ISPs worldwide, meanwhile, were realizing that customers were starting to care about upstream speeds as well as downstream ones. Tech observers, on the other hand, were realizing that very few companies secured their Wi-Fi networks. Researchers were realizing that computers can help pre-school development, the video game industry was realizing that people outside the "typical" gamer demographic were the next big market, and we were hoping the advertising industry would realize the problems with pay-per-click models (limited progress on that front).

The world of TV was rapidly accelerating towards the cord-cutting, Netflix-loving reality of today: TiVo announced plans to bring more internet integration to its platform, and a European survey showing people sacrificing TV time for internet time underlined the need for the former to better incorporate the latter.

Also, we saw a singular incident in favor of cellphone use while driving: a South African man's life was saved when his phone stopped a bullet destined for his head.

Fifteen Years Ago...

I honestly wouldn't have guessed it was this long ago, but this week in 1999 is when Amazon first started taking baby steps into downloadable music, laying the groundwork for what has become one of the largest digital music stores — though, at the time, it was free music as a strategy to boost physical CD sales. Of course, all the way back then, we were also already noting that sales numbers go up when piracy goes up.

Also in 1999: the Palm VII was being snatched up by early adopters, eBay was struggling to keep its servers running, and chess master Gary Kasparov agreed to take on the entire internet in a chess match (he won in 62 moves, but said he expended more effort on it than any other game in his life).

450 Years Ago...

1564 is the year of the first recorded report of the still-quasi-mythical Rat King. Anyone who enjoys such middle-ages folklore should check out this children's novel by Terry Pratchett, which plumbs surprising philosophical and existential depths for a book with such a goofy title.

Filed Under: broadband, isp, look back, tv

This Week In Techdirt History

from the hindsight-is-20-20 dept

Let's embark on another look back through Techdirt's history:

Five Years Ago

This week in 2009, there was a lot of wrangling over royalties and rates. YouTube convinced PRS in the UK to slash its streaming royalties by reminding them just how much they rely on YouTube for an audience. Meanwhile, ASCAP was pushing for videogame sellers to pay performance rights to songwriters. A Swedish indie label operator asked whether $1 per song still make sense in the age of iPods, and a Canadian lawyer was demonstrating the absurdity of Canada's copyright levy system. eMusic had just raised prices after signing Sony to its service — a terrible PR move that the company appeared to be trying to sweep under the rug. In the background of all this was a discussion about the rise and future of internet radio, now a massive royalty battleground all its own.

Five years ago, the RIAA was six months into pushing an earlier version of its voluntary "strikes" plan for ISPs, but none had signed on. Meanwhile, the British government was rejecting the whole notion of "three strikes". On the ISP side, Verizon wasn't counting strikes but it was pitching a screwball argument that US broadband is really competitive.

The USTR had just launched a new website with promises of transparency, and we all know how that went. Also, the Supreme Court had just announced that it would hear the Bilski case, giving it a chance to rule firmly on the question of software and business model patents — which it decided not to do, offering an extremely narrow ruling instead.

Ten Years Ago

In 2004, the CAN-SPAM act was still reasonably young, and we were grappling with its impact. We noted that, as predicted, it increased the amount of spam. It created a whole new service industry for spam detectives, and some major issues like nefarious use of the required 'unsubscribe' button. And of course, companies were rushing to patent anti-spam technology.

Several new tech trends were emerging or taking shape this week in 2004. The public was growing increasingly comfortable with online news, while experts were discussing the future of security and the need to adopt two-factor authentication. The online storage revolution sparked by Gmail was picking up steam with 1gb storage offerings transforming from "news" to "the norm". There was a lot of buzz (and a lot of questions) about the move to 64-bit systems. And we took a look at the youth of the digital age's very own musical art form: circuit bending.

Fifteen Years Ago

It was a quiet week (remember those?) in 1999. We were surprised and a bit dismayed by the sales of Sony's silly $2000 robot dog, excited about the possibility of fiber to the house (before Google would have been anywhere on anyone's list of companies that might offer such a thing), and curious but unsure about the idea of sending exobits per second of data through power lines.

Some traditional companies and retailers were going web-only, and one particularly weird company was offering to write complaint letters for you, for a fee.

519 Years Ago

Over half a millennium ago, in a wonderful and timeless act of innovation, a friar distilled the first-ever batch of Scotch whisky at the Lindores Abbey in Scotland. The order came down this week, on June 1st 1495, from the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, along with the necessary supplies: "To Friar John Cor, by order of the King, to make aqua vitae, VIII bolls of malt."

Filed Under: history, look back, royalties, spam, ustr
Companies: ascap, riaa, verizon

This Week In Techdirt History

from the doomed-to-repeat dept

Another week gone? Another week to look back at the Techdirt archives.

Five Years Ago...

In an unfortunately rare move, the Obama administration sided with innovation rather than Hollywood, with then-Solicitor General (now Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan telling the Supreme Court not to overturn the 2nd Circuit's important Cablevision decision. Of course, now we're waiting to see if Kagan and her colleagues on the Supreme Court undermine that ruling with their upcoming Aereo ruling. Meanwhile, the administration was also getting slammed by a judge in court for ignoring orders concerning a case on warrantless wiretapping. While that case would eventually fail, it foreshadowed some of what we're seeing today.

There were also a bunch of stories about legacy industries behaving badly towards innovation. U2's manager claimed that free is the enemy and that it was a moral imperative to protect old business models. A bunch of newspaper execs gathered to see if they could collude to all agree to put up a paywall. A questionable research report on intellectual property in Canada, paid for by old industry lobbyists, had to be retracted after it was admitted that parts of it were plagiarized. Yes, a report condemning the copying of IP was.... plagiarized.

Meanwhile, more credible research was highlighting how DRM stifled speech and how countries like China would likely use US demands for greater copyright enforcement to increase censorship.

Ten Years Ago...

It was a momentous occasion, because, for the first time, online retailers (in aggregate) were actually profitable. It may be tough to remember, but ten years ago, many were still skeptical about the potential for the e-commerce market.

We also had a bunch of stories that suggest how far (or not) we've come in the past ten years. We saw the first FUD about cyberterrorism, something that has continued to this day. Similarly, a decade ago, we started debating net neutrality. We also suggested that voice communications might decline significantly as people went to text messages. Oh and two new product ideas we weren't too sure about. McDonald's started testing DVD rentals from kiosks (an idea they eventually spun out as RedBox) and some company had the utterly nutty idea to drive around and photograph every building building a giant database of location images. This was way before Google was thinking about doing it. These guys wanted to sell their database to insurance companies, home appraisers and law enforcement. We noted that some might find it cool, while others might find it creepy (both turned out to be true), but figured it was a long way off from reality (not so true).

Fifteen Years Ago...

The group Public Enemy (always ahead of the curve) decided to offer their latest album as a download (though in the ridiculous a2b format). A Clinton administration official admitted the US's policy on encryption was to make it easier for the US to spy on people (some things never change!). Former AOL volunteers sued the company claiming they were unpaid employees (similar to the recent lawsuit against Yelp for the same thing). Oh, and someone realized that some of the messages we'd been blasting into space hoping the aliens would read... contained some mathematical errors. In other words: Dear Aliens, we're stupid.

That's it for this week...

Filed Under: archives, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the randomly-accessing-memory-lane dept

Time for another look back at Techdirt history:

Five Years Ago...

In 2009, the infamous Joel Tenenbaum filesharing case was in progress, and Charles Nesson had just revealed plans to attempt a fair use defense which, as many noted at the time, was destined to fail — but oh how different today would look if downloading had been deemed fair use five years ago. Of course, five years ago the record labels were also trying to bring down the Pirate Bay, an equally unachievable goal that they continue to struggle futilely with today.

This week in 2009, we were still examining the recent decision that ordered Google to pay $1.6-million in back streaming royalties to ASCAP, based on an arbitrary calculation that highlighted just how much of a mess royalties can be. A more personal music dispute was also unfolding, with Coldplay and Joe Satriani locked in a fight about copying that was heavily influenced by amateur musicologists and fans. There was plenty of fighting happening outside the realm of music, too: attorneys general were grandstanding against Craiglist as they are wont to do, and Blizzard was getting aggressive with trademark C&D letters long before its recent campaign to go after hackers.

Ten Years Ago...

Blizzard provides an interesting transition to 2004. It was in November of that year that World of Warcraft came out and revolutionized the world of MMORPGs — but a few months prior, on this week in 2004, we were wondering if the decline of EverQuest (remember EverQuest?) indicated that such games were hitting a wall because of their lack of appeal to casual gamers.

Meanwhile, you can find early roots of plenty of modern trends ten years ago this week. Not too long after the introduction of .biz and .info, but before the rollout of .mobi, Tim Berners-Lee was arguing against new TLDs. He lost the .mobi battle and then, if I recall correctly, was proven wrong when .mobi became the most popular TLD in the world, which we all continue to use and love to this day. Er, right? At the same time, we were discussing the huge success of online pizza ordering (and though I don't think it came to Canada for a couple more years, it's a convenience I confess to using far too frequently) and the return of internet grocery stores (which were still struggling but beginning to find their legs, long before the days of Amazon Fresh). It wasn't just a week of internet trends either: we also noted the growth of often-pointless motorization to make everything from razors to pot scrubbers vibrate and oscillate.

Not every trend was destined to continue, of course: these were also the days of attempts at "paid search", and Lycos (remember Lycos?) was trying to compete with Gmail.

Fifteen Years Ago...

This week in 1999, long-since-forgotten The Mining Company changed its name to About.com, and an internet fixture was born. SETI released its distributed computing screensaver in an early example of crowdsourcing long before that term was in use, and the world learned that Microsoft had a 10-man team dedicated to learning about Linux.

In the device world, the Palm VII was launching, but perhaps more interestingly, so was an early device we described as "a PDA that doubles as a portable MP3 player". To quote Mike at the time: "now, they just need to add in a phone."

200 Years Ago...

Around this time in 1814, German glassblower and physicist Heinrich Geißler was born, and would go on to develop some of the earliest glass vacuum tubes. His designs and techniques evolved into neon lighting, the tubes used to first discover the electron, and the vacuum tube technology that paved the way for the entire world of electronics, broadcast and computing.

Filed Under: archives, history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History

from the way-way-back dept

Another week of history to look back on:

Five Years Ago:

Let's kick this one off with a bang. Five years ago, the CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton said, in public, "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the internet. Period." Believe it or not... he's still in that job today. And we wonder why Hollywood seems to have so much trouble learning how to embrace the internet. On the more optimistic side, we wrote about the amazing power of people on the internet making all sorts of great content. Those two stories show quite a bit of contrast in outlooks.

We also wrote about an Obama advisor who was all excited about how the FCC would be under Julius Genachowski. While we had been skeptical previously, we were briefly hopeful that maybe some good tech policy would happen... though our hopes were quickly dashed by reality.

These were the days before Prenda and Malibu Media, so instead we were talking about ACS:Law, which was basically Prenda's role model over in Europe. It was discovered that Elsevier had a whole division publishing fake medical journals to keep big pharma happy. Oh yeah, and the early days of the lawsuit that would eventually kill off gene patents.

Ten Years Ago:

People were still arguing that no one would want a camera in their phone. The FBI was worried about an evil reclusive millionaire who turned out to... only exist in a video game. Perhaps that's because the $600 million computer system they were building (which was already way over budget) was useless at finding terrorists (that story went on for a few more years, and eventually the system was scrapped entirely -- but not before some computer science experts suggested going on a crime spree the day the system launched...).

Also ten years ago: IBM talked about its plans to launch a web-based office suite in those days before Google Docs came along. Oh yeah, and blogging pioneers Movable Type basically priced themselves out of the market, opening the door to Wordpress to become the blogging platform of choice for many.

Fifteen Years Ago:

Sony decided to sell robotic dogs. I thought the idea sounded crazy, but the Aibo was a big deal for many years. Also the remains of Pointcast were sold off for $10 million. If you weren't around in the mid-90s, you may not remember this, but Pointcast was the "big" internet company with its "push technology." At one point, it was rumored to have turned down an acquisition offer of $500 million. More to the point, this $10 million sale came just two years after a Wired cover story arguing that the web was dead and push technology like Pointcast would replace it. Oh, the good old days of hype. Finally, kicking off yet another bad decision, Yahoo was trying to expand into the enterprise portal business.

That's all for this week in Techdirt history...

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