This Week In Techdirt History: March 23rd – 29th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening the intellectual property reins, and the DOJ was using it to justify indefinite detention of arrested people. Libraries were looking to become pandemic broadband havens if they could get some help from the FCC, a Houston police chief decided he could arrest anyone for speech without worrying about the first amendment, and an anti-vaxxer sued Facebook for shutting down his account. We also wrote about how COVID was exposing the ways copyright is broken, and marked the rather apt anniversary of Jonas Salk declining to patent the polio vaccine.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, the first official legal challenge to the FCC’s Title II net neutrality rules was filed. We looked at how the US had pressured several countries into extending copyright, and how much the copyright industry was pushing for in Australia, as well as their latest angle of attack on anonymity and free speech. Copyright troll Perfect 10 was hit with a hefty judgement over a bogus lawsuit, and we wrote about how bad copyright laws were scaring away investment in digital platforms. We also dug into the way the US government legally stole millions from Kim Dotcom.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, there was an interesting discussion around whether the government could use the term “music piracy” in a criminal copyright trial, and another one about whether anonymous comments are good or evil. An attempt to hit back very strongly against a bogus DMCA takedown failed, the North Face/South Butt fight continued to get nasty, and the Spanish government was moving ahead with a new law to make file sharing and links sites illegal. And EU negotiators insisted that ACTA would move forward just as the full draft text leaked and revealed how bad it was on multiple fronts.
