This Week In Techdirt History: December 4th – 10th

from the as-it-ever-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, New York’s AG rolled out a tool to help people check if their name was used to support killing net neutrality, while we looked at why Ajit Pai had been spending his time attacking Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Pai also didn’t want people talking about a court ruling that undermined his claim that the FTC would protect consumers, then gave a talk at Verizon days before doing the company’s bidding, and was also lying about how net neutrality supposedly harmed the sick and disabled. It also came out that the FCC tried to hide net neutrality complaints against ISPs, while AT&T was insisting that it wouldn’t do anything to harm net net neutrality. Amidst all this, Mike wrote a piece breaking down the thought process behind his change of opinion on the need for net neutrality regulations.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the ITU was making its play to regulate the internet with a media strategy designed to avoid the fate of SOPA and ACTA by focusing on secrecy, while Congress (unsurprisingly) passed a unanimous resolution telling the ITU to back off. UK ISPs blocked the perfectly legal “Promo Bay” project from The Pirate Bay, even as an author’s BitTorrent book promotion drive had excellent results. In the latest DMCA fail, a movie studio issued takedowns of its own authorized films, the MPAA was trying to export US copyright law, but not fair use, to Australia, and the Republican Study Committee caved to backlash and got rid of the author of its excellent report on the copyright system.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, PC World published a list of the most anti-tech organizations in America (guess who made the list). Amidst coverage of ISP traffic shaping in the US, we looked at the situation in the UK. The MPAA took its university toolkit offline because of a GPL violation, Marvel was following in the footsteps of the recording industry and bullying people for sharing comics online, and the terrible PRO IP bill hit the scene. Meanwhile, we noticed the trend of patent hoarders hiding behind shell companies in their lawsuits, and looked at how Apple’s much-vaunted collection of 200 iPhone-related patents didn’t seem to be stopping patent infringement lawsuits.

Filed Under: history, look back