from the how-many-roads dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, Senator Thom Tillis followed up his awful patent reform push with an awful copyright reform push, while bogus automated copyright claims by CBS were blocking a bunch of Super Tuesday speeches, and Senators officially began their push to undermine encryption and Section 230 with the EARN IT act. Devin Nunes and Steven Biss filed yet another bogus SLAPP suit and Donald Trump and Charles Harder sued the Washington Post, while a district court threw out Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculous lawsuit against Google. We also featured a guest post about how tech giants can be defeated with open protocols and interoperability, and featured the first half of a panel discussion about choosing protocols over platforms on the Techdirt podcast.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, the House Judiciary Committee told the FCC that it was going to block net neutrality rules, while we wrote about how even with the rules the fight for an open internet was not over, and indeed there were already potential problems like the zero rating loophole. A court put Jim Hood’s demands of Google on hold, while Hood was demanding $2,100 to fulfill a public records request for his emails with the MPAA. We also wrote about the hypocrisy of the Obama administration when it came to encryption backdoors in China, and about how backdoors will always turn around and bite you in the ass.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, a look at Metallica’s revenue streams raised the question of why they were so worried about Napster, Spanish indie labels were gearing up to sue the government for not stopping file sharing, and a Japanese collection society wanted to charge people for tweeting song lyrics. New ACTA leaks gave more insight into the different positions taken by different countries while skepticism of the agreement was growing, with Danish politicians wondering why Denmark was so against transparency and EU member states eventually deciding to push for ACTA to be more transparent, and Sweden saying it wouldn’t agree to the deal if it required any changes to Swedish or EU laws.
