from the so-it-was dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, a bunch of entertainment industry lobbyists were given a chance to pay $5000 to attend the Grammys with two congressmen, an appeals court handed another loss to MP3 reseller ReDigi, and copyright lobbyists were failing to keep their story straight on the EU Copyright Directive (the problems of which were being aptly demonstrated by the failures of YouTube’s $100 million upload filter). An FCC Commissioner was continuing to rail against community broadband, a report exposed the manifold problems with CBP’s border device search program, and ICE seized over a million websites with no due process. Also, Buzzweed won the defamation lawsuit brought against it over publication of the Steele Dossier.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, a judge issued an injunction against the NSA’s bulk metadata collection, IBM was sued by shareholders for cooperating with the NSA, and seven members of the House Judiciary were demanding the DOJ investigate James Clapper for lying to Congress (while Rep. Peter King said calling out Clapper was a disgrace). CBS aired some NSA propaganda masquerading as journalism, the Wall Street Journal called Edward Snowden a sociopath, and tonedeaf NSA officials told a reporter it’s time to reform the First Amendment. Meanwhile, the CIA was still fighting to block release of the infamous torture report.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, EMI was claiming copyright on Coldplay/Joe Satriani mashup videos, the RIAA was continuing to sue students for file sharing, and Hasbro finally dropped its lawsuit over Scrabulous. There was a strange IP-adjacent fight over plans to build a replica Taj Mahal, copyright cops were crashing weddings in Spain to find evidence of music being played, and UK DVD and CD retailers were giving more bogus predictions about job losses caused by piracy. We also wrote about how the Lori Drew ruling could put more kids at risk, and wondered why the EU was funding a project to create new methods for DRM.
Filed Under: history, look back
